He got closer.
I wanted to swallow. Needed to swallow.
But I was scared shitless at swallowing and what that might do with what was pressed way too close to my throat.
“Now be good,” he whispered.
The cold was gone but he used his grip in my hair to drag me across the floor.
I felt my eyes roll back in my head, my hands darting up to his wrists to hang on and draw myself up so there wasn’t so much weight pulling on my hair, doing this because the pain of that was so immense, it was insane.
He dragged me up to my bed, and if I was coursing with adrenaline and panic before, him taking me to my bed, and what he might do to me there, it consumed me and I didn’t think about any blade.
I just started struggling wildly, pushing, shoving, kicking out my legs, twisting, doing this all begging, “No, please, please, no.”
He quelled my exertions with four more blows to the face, leaving me blinking and fighting to remain conscious before he got me on my back on the bed, straddled me, wrapped his hand around my throat…and squeezed.
Moving with reflexive desire to remain breathing, my legs kicked out behind him without me telling them to do it, my hips bucked, my nails tore at his wrist and forearm.
He just reached beyond me, nabbed something from the nightstand and I saw it illuminate his masked face when he engaged my phone.
“Password,” he bit out.
I kept struggling and since he was choking me, gurgling.
He lifted me by my throat and slammed me into the bed, apparently totally unfazed by any of my thrashing.
He got in my face, released some pressure on my throat and barked, “Password!”
“Eight, seven, three, nine,” I breathed then sucked back a harsh, desperate breath but only got half of it in.
He started choking me again.
And he did this making a call.
I didn’t care if he called Geneva, just as long as I got out of this alive.
So I kept fighting.
He was bigger than me, leaner than me, fitter than me, obviously stronger than me and really fucking good at choking people.
He was going to kill me.
At this realization, my stomach dropped, thoughts exploded in my brain, feelings grazing through me leaving wounds. Fear. Panic. Regret. Disbelief. Pain.
Fuck, Deke was going to find me.
Fuck, Deke had a key and if this guy left me where I lay after he was done throttling me, it would be Deke that found me.
I bucked ferociously with my hips and scored deep with my nails in his flesh, feeling myself tearing through fabric and breaking skin.
It was like he was a rodeo rider, he held on without a flinch.
It was happening. Oxygen depletion. The fight going out of me. My vision getting fuzzy. The black seeping in from the outsides of my eyes. He was fading and nothing was in my brain. Not a thing.
Except focusing all my efforts on dragging in air that just wasn’t coming.
I stopped flailing to concentrate everything I had on trying to breathe and the gruesome, useless noises I was making attempting to pull in oxygen filled the air.
“That’s your girl, Justice,” he said into the phone. “Listen,” he ordered and my phone was to my face.
I feebly lifted an arm to shove it up his jaw in one final effort to push him off me, but it just glanced off, dropping to the side as I kept suffocating.
He took the phone from me and said in it, “You get me what you owe me. You fuckin’ get it to me. You got a week. You don’t get it to me, she goes down and that other one does too.”
With that, he threw my phone on the bed and took his hand from my throat.
I twisted to the side under him, curling into myself, drawing in long, grating breaths, one after another, my hands to my throat.
“I will get to you. I don’t get paid, you pay,” he whispered in my ear. “You let her know that.”
Hand to my throat, he turned me, and I thrashed in terror at his grip there again, rasping out, “No!”
But he just hit me.
And again.
And again.
Which was when it all went black.
* * * * *
I woke up on my bed, no idea how long I’d been out. But my face was on fire, my throat was on fire and I had only one thought.
Get the fuck out of there.
I scrambled to my hands and knees, awkward and clumsy in my fear, and fell off the side of the bed, landing all my weight on a wrist.
I didn’t even feel the pain.
I grabbed the bed and nightstand, the lamp falling off as I hauled myself up.
I felt around on the nightstand for my keys, and in my agitated searching, they fell to the floor.
I dropped to my knees to find them, and in the dark actually hit them, sending them careening away from me.
I did this twice, frantically crawling after them, until I snatched them up in my hand and I held them so tight, the metal bit into my flesh.
I got to my feet and I ran.
Out the bedroom into the great room and to the front door.
I slammed into it.
It was locked.
With fumbling fingers, I unlocked it and tore out of my house, my bare feet going from the smooth flagstone walk to the biting gravel of my driveway, and I didn’t care.
I threw an arm out, half hugging my granddad’s truck, running my arm along its side, the hood as I rounded it to get to the driver’s side.
I got there, whispered my chant of, “Together, keep it together. Get in the truck and go. Together, keep it together,” in an effort to get the key in the hole to open my door without wasting another second dropping them from my violently shaking hands.