Chapter 51 Mehar
MEHAR
The first thing I heard was Usher and Alicia Keys.
“My Boo” playing through speakers that were muffled by the metal and carpet between me and the rest of the car.
The second thing I heard was gravel under tires, loud and grinding, vibrating through my skull where the pain from the parking garage was still pulsing like a second heartbeat.
I was in a trunk.
My wrists were zip-tied behind my back, my knees were jammed against my chest, my cheek was flat against cheap carpet, and the space was so tight I could feel my own breath bouncing back at me.
The exhaust fumes and something chemical were burning the back of my throat, and my shoulder was screaming from where I’d been dragged across concrete.
The parking garage. The hotel. I’d been getting out of my car and then there was the impact on my skull and hands grabbing me and then nothing. Until now.
The car slowed. The gravel got louder. We’d left the main road a while ago, and wherever we were going was the kind of place people go when they don’t want what they’re doing to be seen.
The car stopped. Engine still running. A door opened, then closed. Footsteps on gravel, coming around to the back of the vehicle in no particular hurry.
I let my body go slack. Slowed my breathing. Made my muscles heavy. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to thrash and kick, but instinct without information gets people killed, and I had no information. So I waited.
The key turned in the lock. The trunk popped open and cool air rushed over my skin.
Whoever had opened it was just standing there, looking down at me with a patience that turned my stomach.
Like they’d been thinking about this for a long time.
Like this moment was the payoff for something that started long before tonight.
My eyes opened.
The face looking down at me was half-lit by the moon and half-hidden in shadow, and for three full seconds my brain refused to process it. It stalled completely because this face was not on my list. This face wasn’t on any list I would have made in a million years.
It was Janelle.
My therapist. The woman I’d called last night crying about my breakup.
The woman who’d told me to journal my feelings and let the page hold what my body couldn’t.
The woman who’d sat across from me in a warm office for the last eight months and listened to every secret and every wound and every fear I’d ever carried and used all of it to build a map of exactly how to destroy me.
She was standing over the trunk with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Something quiet and settled and eerily calm, like a mask I didn’t know existed had finally come off, and what was underneath it had been there the whole time.
“What the fuck?!”