Chapter 25
The perfect sacrifice
The forest's cold breeze feels even more intense as I sink deeper into its heart. The trees become denser and denser, making it hard for me to weave through them. The sounds from afar are quickly approaching. Each step I am taking can bring me closer to another hell I want to avoid. I am trying to escape from one, but I don’t think my small body with fast steps is able to slip away quickly enough.
I feel like he wants to surround me, that he is catching up with my pace.
The exhaustion starts to swallow me whole while I am running barefoot in the known forest. The one where horrible things happened because of her.
Not even the fact that I am wearing a very thin dress in the storm that had struck against the wilderness is helping much, because I start shivering cold.
My vision blurs as the rain becomes stronger.
Everything around me is harder to see through the raindrops.
One second of negligence keeps me from noticing the root of the big tree.
I try to stop myself from falling, but my hands let me slip through the wetness of the ground, and I end up on my stomach.
The ache is pushing through my whole body. The sprained ankle accentuates my fear, and I can’t get up. I can’t escape him, because I am hearing his steps getting closer fast, even against the strong storm.
My breathing gets heavier while I crawl to the tree trunk next to me.
I hope he won’t be able to see me and that he would only get past me.
That I will have a couple of peaceful seconds while I can think about my next move.
I need to see how the hell I can escape the inevitable danger that wanted to attack me from all sides.
I feel my hands shivering and bleeding, colouring my white nightgown with pink flowers that I chose last night to relax and sleep, not run from a psychopath in a forest.
My whole left leg is now fully exposed through the long rupture of my dress. I try to cover it, but then I hear the sound of a broken ranch and a couple of steps getting close to me. Too close.
I put my hands on my mouth, trying to cover the crying spasms that started with my running. I want my breathing not to be heard, but I realise it was all in vain when I feel his presence close to me.
A strong wind gust makes my wet skin shiver and lifts my dress way too high.
That’s when I know he saw me.
“You can’t hide from me, Anmara,” I hear Cathal’s voice from behind the tree trunk. “I’ll always find you.”
He jumps in front of me, scaring the shit out of me. I scream, and even through my fingers I can hear the strong echo of my yelling through the woods.
He catches my wrists, and I cannot hold my shouting that should’ve scared all the animals in the forest. It only seems to draw them closer to the danger I am in.
“Let go of me!”
I cry, kicking just one of my legs, because the left one hurt so much I can’t even move it.
“Never!”
He ties my hands with a string that he throws over a thick branch and pulls it, letting me hang in the air, screaming, while he fixates the rope around the tree.
“No, please, let me go!” I cry, even though I know nothing will stop him from finishing what he started.
He just smirks dangerously, and I realise that I have no way out of his torture.
“Now I can finally play with you the way I want," he says, and then looks at the rupture of my dress. “How nice of you. You already made my job easier.” Cathal laughs as he grabs the dress’s already ripped edges, pulling them until it fully rips apart.
It is hanging on each of my hands, leaving me naked and exposed in front of him, with absolutely nothing to cover me.
“You’ll only be mine,” Cathal’s voice says, but his face distorts and slowly transforms into Lucas’s.
I’m losing my voice from how strong my echo sounds in the woods. I start trembling, confused and frightened by the image before my eyes.
He is holding a knife in his left hand, and it’s coming dangerously close to my intimate zone.
With the other hand, he pulls up my legs.
I want to move and hit his face, but he just pushes the knife into my vagina.
I start to scream with all the vocal cords I have and strongly close my eyes as I can’t handle the huge pain anymore, slowly accepting my fate.
I feel shaken, and I abruptly open my eyes. The first thing I see is Lucas’s worried face and his sweaty forehead.
I inhale profoundly, trying to calm down, and quickly look around. Next to Lucas are Paul and Blake, who are watching me with the same concern in their gazes, probably because of the screams that came out of me even beyond the dream.
The memories from last night slowly come into my mind, and I look at myself. I breathe with relief and put my head back on the pillow when I see that my clothes are back in place and Lucas’s cock disappeared from inside of me.
“What the hell did you dream that you screamed so loud?” Blake asks with his hoarse voice, half-asleep, rubbing his eyes.
“Believe me, you don’t wanna know.”
I take one of the pillows from near me and put it on my face. I just want to forget about my grotesque dream with the dress with pink flowers and another crazy man who wanted to mark me down to the death.
?
“Don’t do anything stupid, or you won’t get out in one piece from this,” I tell Blake while I walk beside him to the first place on the list.
“I will be as well-behaved as a baby, mom," he says, winking at me while keeping an innocent smile on his face.
It only makes me roll my eyes. I am afraid of not ending up with my pupils seared onto the back of my eyelids, given how often I’m doing that move. But, until then, Anora agrees with my reactions.
You could, however, play with him a little, too. Maybe he has it bigger than Lucas now.
I abstain from rolling my eyes again in less than five seconds from the last time I did that.
Fucking perverse.
Muah.
I don’t mind her and try to push Anora deep inside my brain until I’ll need her energy.
Last night, we all created a complex plan, and each of us was responsible for one piece. Paul, as the big idiot he was, didn’t care about his safety and wanted to come. At his insufferable insistence and his hunger for revenge, I got him attached to our plan.
The more, the merrier, as they say.
I would’ve loved to let each of us have a piece of Tamwine to cover as much ground as possible, but given Paul’s past with Bianca, I couldn’t trust him. I also didn’t trust Blake enough to leave him alone with Paul.
However much I wanted to go with Lucas, I found the reasons that stopped me from doing so. The first one was Blake, which I wanted to keep under observation, and the second… my feelings for Lucas.
And of course, he insisted on going alongside Blake in case the drug didn’t get out of his system, but I didn’t have the necessary strength to take care of Paul.
So, I ended up going with Blake to the first building on our list in the opposite direction from Lucas and Paul, to cover more ground in one day.
That is the train station.
Since I first came to this place, it seemed really strange that it was so full of flowers and too big for it to be normal. Only remembering the times I visited it when I was in Tamwine alone, I realise that something is wrong with it.
The perfection is normal up to a point, and in this fucking town… I have a feeling that the fucked-up things started at the origin.
During my travels here, I learned that the train station was the oldest building and that it was renovated when Marshall bought the hotel, so it couldn’t be a coincidence.
We arrive in front of it, and I see that, like all the other premises, the black shutters are shut at all the superior windows. I take a deep breath and go with Blake behind me to the building. To the only door we can see.
Blake gets past me before getting to the entrance and opens the door. He doesn’t wait for me to enter. I have to hold it so it won’t slam directly in my face.
“Fucking gentleman,” I mumble, closing the door behind me.
The ceiling is pretty low, but the room is very bright. Also, one thing is extremely strange. There is a door to the toilets, but that is really the only one. I don’t even see a pair of stairs here.
“Stay here. I’m going to look on the outside,” Blake says, and gets out of the building before I get to say anything.
I study the familiar interior. How could I have not seen how monotone it was on the inside?
I mean, compared to the colourful exterior, it is a pretty big difference.
All the columns and walls are in grey tones, identical to the ceiling.
The floor is of an intense matte black, the same as the ticket booths on the left side of the room.
The two employees are dressed in dark grey uniforms, with their hair in neat buns, no hair out of place.
Both of the ladies seem to be around 50 years old, but their hair is as dark as night, and it doesn’t even seem dyed.
And I, who before Paul’s wedding was covering a few white hairs with a marker.
Their gazes, though, are exactly as the florist’s: empty, inexpressive, lost. They are just glaring at a fixed point in the building, without doing anything else. Also, there are no other humans here. The room is empty, aside from the two employees and me.
I can’t wait for Blake anymore, so I go to the door that pointed to the toilets. Inside, I am presented with three options: women’s and men’s restrooms, and a door with a sign that says no entry.
When was the last time you played by the rules?
I grab the handle, but it won’t move at all, so it is locked. Of course.
I want to inspect the other rooms, but the main door is about to hit me. My instincts and reaction speed help me avoid it. I dodge it only by a few inches.
Blake enters the small and dimly lit hallway, and his gaze tells me that we don’t have any other option. We have to look around these rooms.
“It’s locked,” I tell him when he goes to the no-entry door.
He nods and points me to the ladies' room, while he goes to the men’s and tells me through his gaze to stay quiet.
He is right on that. We don’t know if there are microphones around.
I enter the room, and I’m greeted by a few elegant sinks and three cubicles, of which one has a maintenance sign. I open the two normal ones, and I don’t find anything else besides a WC.
I look at the phantom door and try to open it.
It is locked.
You know what? I’m kinda sick of this.
I prepare myself emotionally and physically for this, inhaling deeply. I lift my leg and kick the door.
It seems the gym helped you.
This is as far as she can compliment me with when she sees the open door and a pair of stairs inside it.
I don’t even get to go look for Blake, as I see him entering. He glares to see if something happened to me, then he looks at the dark pair of stairs from behind the door.
He doesn’t say anything, but goes up the stairs after lighting up the lantern he took from Lucas. The only object he trusted him with.
I have a gun I don’t know how to use at my back, a knife in my high heels, a lantern that I take out of my shorts pocket, and a walkie-talkie with which we could communicate with Lucas and Paul. Lucas is the only one with a phone, so we had to find another method.
I follow him up the stairs with small steps, not knowing what awaits us. The stairs are in a long spiral, and I ask myself if this building has some sort of tower I didn’t know about and a Rapunzel they held captive.
We reach their end and see a door, which we slowly open. What is behind it takes all the air in my lungs.
“Oh my God,” I say while taking Blake’s hand into mine and moving forward beside him inside the room.
I can feel Blake starting to shiver and squeezing my hand while getting closer to it, probably asking himself if the image in front of us is real. Or rather, if the person we are seeing is real.
Tick nails in her hands and legs, the head bent down, the long, gold hair stained with blood that is dripping on the weak body. And that’s not all.
“Blake, this is the dress from my dream.”
My lips are trembling while speaking, and hot tears are already reaching my thin t-shirt.
“The dress from your dream? Anmara, what the hell did you dream about?” he asks in a scared voice, looking at me with tears in his eyes as well.
I look back at the girl. Her dress has the exact same tear on her left side as I had. It exposes her scratched calf, full of coagulated blood.
“Me looking like her,” I resume, because the finale of the dream was close to what I’m seeing.
The only difference is that the lifeless being in front of us is a sacrifice, and her blood has written on the wall what I didn’t want to see. I thought that Marshall was the only one making these kinds of experiments…
A bird that seemed lost?
The perfect sacrifice?
No, more than that.
A successful experiment.
See you soon.
The signature seems a B over an O, and as they are Bianca’s initials, it seems I was more wrong than I could have ever imagined.
This is bad. Really, really bad.
More than that, when Blake gets closer and lifts the girl's face with the lantern, he immediately puts it down. The terror surrounds us, and the tears start flowing aggressively from our eyes, together with quivering sobs and a strong embrace.
The girl in front of us is none other than their sister, who was supposed to be dead for ten years.
The lost bird.