Chapter 16
It took him an hour to arrive.
My blade had dropped through the net when it pulled up and as I swung midair, I had searched for a way to get out of it and found none.
While waiting for my captor I found an awkward yet comfortable position and applied my vitamin C face mask and waited for the owner of the net to finally arrive and claim their prey.
Dig leaned up against the building with his arms crossed, laughing.
Of course.
“Do you also have moisturiser?” I asked him. “Specifically, the Ferben No.6 moisturiser from last year’s spring line?”
“No.”
“I’m disappointed.”
“I will kill all the mother fuckers in this battle, tear down the concrete walls with my bare hands and find every bottle of Ferben No.6 moisturiser from last year’s spring line and fill up the ocean with it for you to bathe in.”
“Alright.”
“And I’ll watch you bathe—”
“Can you cut me down?”
“I’m cutting you down now.”
“Actually, just wait. I still have at least five minutes.” I patted my facemask ensuring the serum was soaking into my skin. “Give me five—ah!”
He cut the rope and I fell into his arms.
This time he bound my wrists, my ankles and put a gag around my mouth before he swung me over his shoulder and stalked through the streets.
“Ma—it—bo—fa? Ow!” My nose squashed into his lower back as he leapt over an oil drum.
The street diseased with broken furniture and rusted metal strewn from stores. Spider silk gleamed in the midday sun and Dig splashed through a puddle of blood. I rocked over his shoulder. The world swirled. I considered closing my eyes and napping.
Day four.
Almost halfway.
I needed an advent calendar; this was like a Christmas countdown.
The cannibals would put on their cooking pots soon.
A drone buzzed overhead, watching. Hopefully Magnus was too.
He still had not yet shown up to retrieve me which meant he had not yet retrieved Tommy. The only person who seemed to be trying their best around here was Dig Graves.
“Ga—hi—ta?” I asked him.
He did not answer.
“Ho—la—fee?”
“Shut up.” He gave my ass a pat. “Someone’s around the corner.”
I twisted and saw them walking on their heads in my upside-down manner, blinking through the dizzy gust running into my brain.
The lesbians!
Donning their tattooed skin and facial piercings and large boots, they paused when they saw us and held out their weapons to Dig. He pulled out a blade of his own. Both parties assessed their situation.
I wriggled, trying to pull up my hand and waved to them. “He—o.”
They did not greet me back.
“You know there’s a hit out on you?” The woman in the middle said, the same one who had eaten my shortbread and decided I could not join their group because my shortbread was not good enough even though I absolutely knew it was, and she had most definitely enjoyed it.
“Most these cocks ‘ave been paid off to kill you. I heard Ernie from Haver talkin’ ‘bout it. Some asshole in a white jacket offered him a private cell for full the year, an ergonomic pillow and hot wings every Thursday.”
Dig lowered his blade. “Is that why everyone’s trying to kill me more than usual?”
“You betcha.”
“Fuck.”
She looked at myself, flung over his shoulder. “Who’s that?”
“Mine.”
“Alright.”
“Fight?”
“Hell no.”
Everyone went their separate ways.
I woke up when a metal door clanged open after having a nap over Dig Graves shoulder. The taste of the gag urged vomit to rise in my throat, and I yawned through it as he walked into an old mechanic’s and pushed the door behind him closed.
He walked past the ground floor where a truck was still mid-engine change from years ago and stomped up a staircase with missing steps, heaving me inside to the office space upstairs.
Fragranced with oil and steel, the room filled up with buttery light.
Cleaned of dust and cobwebs, it was well organised with a mattress on the floor, its sheets tucked in neatly, the pillows plump.
Weapons lined the walls on the studded board where tools used to be, and a desk and chair remained in the back corner as if business occurred as usual.
“This isn’t where we are staying.” Dig sat me upright on the mattress. “This is just one of my safe houses. We’ll head to my actual place, but we can’t be out on the streets, too many people out there. During the day we hide, during the night we travel.”
He pulled the gag from out of my mouth.
Three windows and a single door. Two of the windows had their locks broken and both were open, letting in crisp breeze. Jumping off the second storey would break my legs. I searched the room for rope. There should be something in here to assist me outside the window.
Dig brought out a pen and strode to the back wall which had been graffitied into a map. Hand drawn of the entire arena. The city of Tar spread out in its circle, showing the streets and carcass of buildings and jumbles of where the old vehicles were parked.
Outside, someone shouted, and Dig promptly slunk to the window and pulled back a blind. The person must have left as his shoulders fell, losing their tension.
“It’s your brother.”
My chest burst with happiness. “Magnus is here?”
“Huh? No.” He let the blind close. “It’s your brother who’s paying these cracks to come after me.” He crossed his arms and leaned against his mapped wall.
The entire arena sat upon Dig Graves’s shoulders. A heavy layer of death splaying out as if he had grown wings. Seven years this creature had somehow survived and had the memory of every step he had taken in here.
“This is the first year I’ve had this many people try to hunt me down.” He gritted his teeth. “Usually, they’re too scared. The only thing to cure scared is stupid. Which means they’ve been offered stupid money and the only person I know with stupid money is Magnus De Astor.”
“I have no idea who that is.”
“You and your brother are a real cute couple.”
“I don’t have a brother.”
He lunged for me.
I jolted with healthy fear and squeezed my eyes closed expecting a slap, a punch a hair pull, anything.
Peeling my eyes open slowly I came face-to-face with Dig Graves.
The sunlight willowed in from the window above, stretching its deep glimmers over the smoulder of his mouth.
In the cavern of his black hood, I found the structure of his face.
A sturdy jaw with a neat chin. High cheek bones and a ski-slope nose.
That scar over his lower lip was healing.
His red heart-shaped sunglasses had scratches.
A faded emblem told me they were polarised. Sun smart. I liked that.
“Can I touch your chest?” He asked.
I blinked twice as fast. “Excuse me?”
“Can I touch your chest?”
“Uh, fine.”
He pressed his palm over my heart. His expression fixed with curiosity and then, concern, like that of a doctor examining a patient.
He stayed fixed with his hand across my chest, and I looked down at it.
A large, strong hand with bruised knuckles and seven years’ worth of scars.
Against the smooth skin of my chest, it was a stark difference to see how we had been living very different lives.
Through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, I tried to find his eyes. Just a faint outline of lashes fluttered inside the murky black glass.
“What the fuck?” he whispered. I think he was speaking to himself, not to me, but I answered anyway.
“No, I am still afraid.” I blew out air.
“I am just exceptionally good at controlling my heartbeat. My feelings don’t succumb to me as others do.
I find it annoying and impractical. But I can assure you, I am very concerned about my being here with you.
If you’d like to begin torture, you may, however I must tell you now, if your objective is to make me cry, I will be more than contented to assist you as I’ve been trying to cry for years. ”
He wasn’t listening to my words.
Only my heartbeat.
Another noise emitted from outside and he checked the window again. When he decided the passerby had gone, he dug into a suitcase on the shelf, bringing out a pair of women’s boots and set them next to my feet.
My brows sprung up in delight. “Did you get those from the paedophiles?”
“Yes.” He picked up one of my bloody feet and grimaced.
“Trade?”
“Kill.”
“All of them?”
“They scattered like fucking cockroaches I couldn’t get all of them.”
“Most of your cussing is very unnecessary.”
“I have to clean your feet.”
“Do you have a pedicure certification?”
“They’re a fucking mess.”
“You didn’t need to cuss in that sentence.”
“I'm not going to be able to carry you all the way to my place if I keep getting interrupted from people trying to kill us. I need you to run if we get chased.”
“I will undoubtedly escape you.”
“You’re staying with me.”
I grimaced. “I’m not attracted to you in that way.”
“I’ll get plastic surgery.”
“I can’t be doing this. I have a lot on my plate right now.”
“I can eat for two.”
“I think we’re better off as friends.”
“Yeah, boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“I’m seeing someone else right now.”
“Yeah, you’re seeing me.”
“You’re not really my type.”
“Type faster.” He undid the rope that bound my ankles.
I kicked him. I heeled his throat and used my other leg to kick the side of his jaw, making him topple into me and wrapped my legs around his head until his face pushed into my pelvis. I kept him locked there with the strength of my thighs.
He groaned.
A head scissors armbar—or at least an interpretation of it.
My defence training included ways in which I would be apprehended by an oppressor, one of the most common was with my hands tied behind my back whilst lying down.
Suffocating them with my thighs was simple protocol. I had been keeping up with my squats.
I smiled down at Dig, his coughs muffled into my pelvis. “People have been trying to kill me since the moment I slipped out of my mother’s womb. Do you really think I don't know the basics of self-defence training?”
He groaned, unable to speak and tried to force himself up but could not, nor could he ply my thighs apart. His hands wrapped around my thighs and did their best, even digging his nails into my soft flesh. However, his nails were trimmed and did not prick.
He muffled cuss words—at least that’s what I assumed they were—as he started to lose breath and begin the stages of suffocation.
I watched on with admiration as Dig Graves was unable to free himself from two feminine thighs.
The lock was unescapable. There was nothing he could do to make me open my legs for him. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
And then his mouth moved over my clit and I heard colours.