Chapter Eleven – Logan
I wake up at one. My fault, really. I stayed up late, although not on purpose. I wasn’t able to fall asleep. Thoughts of Wren and the look on her face when she told me to leave kept haunting me, pulling me down, and nothing I did could shake them.
I couldn’t even get myself to go out on a fucking Friday night. It’s a day I should’ve been partying it up, getting wasted, taking some nameless girl home and fucking her senseless. It’s what the old me would’ve wanted to do, and nothing and no one would have been able to stop me.
But, clearly, I’m not the old me anymore.
Something changed. Wren did something to me.
I don’t know when and I don’t know how, and no amount of rationalizing it is helping me to see the big picture clearly.
Honestly? I don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here.
Nothing feels as if it has purpose if I can’t have her.
I shuffle to the kitchen and make some food.
Leftovers. It’s about all I can cook. Throw something in the microwave and shovel it down, regardless of how unevenly re-heated it is.
After that, I shower, and I take my time in there—but not for the reasons one might think a twenty-three-year-old guy would take a long shower.
I hate this. I hate my life. I thought my life couldn’t get any worse, and yet here I am, proving myself wrong. It sucks.
Hmm. I wonder if I should try going to Wren again. I don’t want to direct Sloane’s wrath at me or tempt fate when it comes to her threats of murder, but at the same time, I can’t just sit back and let Wren slip through my fingers, not when not having her is making me lose all grip on reality.
This isn’t a life. This is a shadow of a life.
After getting out of the shower, I head to my room and throw some clean clothes on. I walk downstairs to grab something to drink and plop myself down on the couch, but the moment my feet hit the first floor, I hear something. Talking.
Tensing up, I head into the living room to find the TV is on, something I most definitely didn’t do myself. Ugh. Is it on the fritz already? TVs should last more than six months, right? Maybe I got a shitty model or something.
Whatever. I go to grab the remote. It sits on the couch, on the center cushion—which, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember leaving it there.
What the hell is going on?
Eyebrows creasing, I grab the remote and turn around.
My plan is to shut the TV off and then see if anything else is out of place, but the very second I spin around, I see someone wearing all black rush at me while making not a sound.
A fruity-smelling cloth is placed over my mouth and nose before I realize what’s happening, and it only takes a few inhalations for me to get dizzy and lose consciousness.
Well… fuck.
Wren lays beside me, an easy smile tugging at her face.
Her brown eyes are warm, and she blinks slowly at me, having eyes for no one else.
Like I’m the only person to exist in her world.
Her long brown hair is messy, sticking every which way, but it only adds to her beauty.
We lay facing each other in my bed, cuddled close, and yet I can see every single detail on her face perfectly.
I touch her cheek, drawing my fingers down the side of her face as I let out a breath I wasn’t even aware I was holding. “I thought you’d never come back to me,” I whisper to her, a kind of happiness deep in my bones I can’t deny.
This is how it should always be.
I don’t recognize the room we’re in. It doesn’t look like my bedroom, but it also doesn’t really look like anything. Beyond her, everything is a little blurry, fuzzy, like it’s not totally concrete. Like it’s not real.
But it has to be.
It has to be real. If it’s not… I’ll lose my mind.
She blinks slowly at me, the soft smile still on her face when she whispers, “You know I couldn’t stay away from you. Staying away from you is impossible. Logan, I—” She stops, hesitating, and I’m dying to know how she was going to finish that sentence.
“You what?” The words can barely escape my lips, spoken in such hushed tones I almost think she doesn’t hear me.
She starts saying those three words, the three words I’ve been dying to hear since I first fucked up all that time ago, but before she can finish them, the world is ripped out from under me, and I wake up.
I wake up to a room full of blackness, with cold concrete beneath me.
I groan. I’m facedown, wherever I am, and I roll onto my back and mutter a harsh, “Fuck.” Bringing my hands to my head, my brain pounds inside my skull, like it’s trying to warn me or something.
I blink, and I’m pretty damn sure my eyes are open, but I see no light whatsoever.
Just an utterly pitch-black room with stale, semi-cold air.
Where the fuck am I? I try to remember how I got here, but everything is fuzzy. I remember showering, and then… shit, not much else after that. What is going on?
Working to sit up, the lights flash on, momentarily blinding me in the process.
I shield my eyes from the vibrant white light and blink a dozen or more times as my eyes are slow to adjust to the sudden addition.
I’m sitting in what looks like a room in a basement somewhere, no windows, nothing but concrete all around me.
I’m facing a wall made of cinderblocks, and with a pounding head I struggle to get to my feet.
What the hell is this? Where am I? Some fuzzy memories come rushing back as I steady myself against the cinderblock wall: the TV was on in my place, the volume up loud. I went to turn it off and then… then blackness.
Oh, fuck. Was I kidnapped? So not cool. Whoever the hell took me is going to regret taking me, I’ll make sure of that. I’m no stranger to crazy-ass situations like this.
I let out a slow breath before I turn around and see a lone door in the room. The room itself is maybe a seven-by-seven space, the size of a tiny bathroom, but it’s not the room itself that makes something harden in my gut. No, the message written on the door does.
Your life is in your hands.
My life is in my hands? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? It’s ominous, yes, and it’s written in some kind of drippy paint, making it look as though it was painted in blood.
I look all around me, but there’s nothing else in the room. No cameras, nothing. Just the door, the message on it, and a lightbulb sticking out of the ceiling. I guess that means whoever took me wants me to head out that door.
Seeing as how there’s nothing else for me to do at this point, I step closer to the door. A part of me does wonder if I should stay right where I am, but I’m not sure which would be the smarter choice: stay or venture out and see what that message means?
Either way, I have the feeling I’m not going to like it.
I inhale as deeply as my lungs allow, and I reach for the door knob. I pull it open into the room I’m currently in, revealing a narrow hall that goes straight for a few feet and then abruptly turns left. Only one way to go, and that’s forward.
Well, here goes literally nothing.
I step out of the room and into the hall. The narrow hall guides me, only giving me one option. I don’t know where it’s leading me, but after a few sharp turns, I eventually come upon another closed door.
No message written on this one, and yet something in my lower gut is telling me I probably won’t like what I find inside this room. Whether I like it or not, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I have no choice but to press on and see just what the fuck this is all about.
I yank open the door and step into the room, and the very moment my two feet cross the threshold, something changes. The light in this particular room flickers, and I take a single step deeper into the room when I feel something sharp slice my cheek. I freeze and take a tiny step back.
It’s not an overwhelming amount of pain; more like a papercut than anything else. My brows furrow as I reach up and touch my cheek where the sting is, and as I draw my hand away, I look down and see bright red smeared on my fingertips. Blood. My blood.
What the fuck?
Once I realize what it is, I sharply glance up and stare straight ahead.
With the flickering light, it’s hard to see, but the room—which is maybe only five feet wide by five feet long—is full of thin, silvery strands attached to each side wall at varying levels of height.
Given how easily the first one cut into my face, I can imagine someone who’s not paying attention could cut themselves up quite badly in a room like this.
Someone who was rushing might not even realize what they were walking into until it was too late.
This time I have to say it aloud, “What the fuck?” Where am I? What the fuck kind of weird shit is this? It’s almost like a deadly maze or something. Who the hell would do something like this?
Past the razor-thin wires that line the room, I see another door, the only other way out of here. To get to it, I need to traverse this room and hope I can artfully dodge the other wires and not cut myself up to shreds in the process. A room like this could kill someone if they aren’t careful.
It’s funny. The past few months I’ve felt like death, like I was already dead.
It reminded me of how I felt in the immediate aftermath of being kicked out from Black Sacrament, only it was a different sort of loss that made me spiral.
But here? I don’t want to die here. I can’t fucking die here.
This place, wherever it is, whoever took me; I don’t want to disappear forever. I need to see Wren again.
So I push forward, because it’s the only thing I can do.
I duck beneath the first wire, careful in stopping before the second—the second is lower, chest-level.
With how sharp it is, I don’t doubt that it can cut through cloth just as easily as it can apparently cut through flesh.
With the right force behind it, I’m sure it could saw through bone, too.