25
Patrena
After spending intense days in interrogation, my heavy eyes and weighted body hadn’t cooperated with me enough to inflict physical damage to my enemy. I was used to fighting, and finding ways to get myself out of situations. My inability to do so in this case was worse than physical torture.
These people hadn’t inflicted the type of bodily harm on me I knew they were capable of and that I had expected. However, I wasn’t naïve about my situation. If they didn’t find what they were searching for and fast, I could lose some fingers, toes, an arm, or leg. There were no laws, no rules, or no one to stop them from doing whatever they deemed necessary to get what they wanted from me.
Instead of torturing me, they had taken away my ability to operate my own body while bombarding me with questions I didn’t have answers to. They were also subjecting me to comments about my mother that worked on ripping apart my emotions.
The last injection must have been sodium thiopental or something similar. It relaxed me to a point that my mouth would spit out whatever my brain thought. In other words, it was truth serum.
“You could use some major work on your double chin, turkey-neck. How did it end up all merged together like that? It looks like it fought with gravity and gravity kicked its ass,” I informed the shorter man, laughing my ass off. The other man had turned away and pretended to be searching for something on the only table in the room, no doubt hiding his laughter.
This was the third rant I had veered into when the questions they were asking failed to pull answers from me that made sense. They must have added a muscle relaxer to the mix because I was a slab of wiggling Jell-O on the bed. Although I wasn’t in my right frame of mind and my body had transformed to gelatin, it didn’t stop me from pulling against the restraints with images of smashing my fist into their faces floating through my head.
The drugs were my kryptonite, leaving me as defenseless as a newborn tossed into the woods. Days had started to merge into each other, and I’d begun to lose touch with reality, living in a haze. There were days they strapped me to the table for hours, searching, picking, and prodding. Other days, they would have a set of interrogation specialists question me for hours at a time.
Today, I didn’t bother to adjust the baggy hospital gown they had tied me into while sitting cross-legged in the middle of my narrow bed. They had assigned me a small room, a prison cell, equipped with multiple cameras so they could study me like a specimen under a microscope.
All I wanted was a few hours of sleep, but I was unable to shut down and sleep deprivation had me loopy, seeing things that weren’t there, and jumping at the slightest sound. When they found my tattoo the first day, other than study it, they had no idea how to make it talk to them.
They confirmed that they weren’t interested in turning me in for the tattoo reward money. They wanted the big payday. They wanted the billion-dollar information they wholeheartedly believed my mother had stashed away on my body or on some item she had given me.
This was day…day… four, five, or possibly six that I had been in captivity in this facility. Was Tywin searching for me? Were the ladies? Had they all gone to war with the Cardenas Cartel? If so, no one would notice me missing right away. If anybody knew the answers to some of my questions, it was these information vampires who had taken me.
When they had brought in a hypnotist, who’d made several attempts to hypnotize me a day or two ago, it took everything in me not to laugh at the extremes these people were willing to explore for information.
I had fed them false addresses that led to secret trinkets I had lied about receiving from my mother when I was little. They had examined several pieces of my jewelry that I’d had laying around my apartment, thinking it would lead them to the hidden treasure.
I had also made two escape attempts, giving one of the guards a black eye. One day had been particularly eventful wherein I had them ripping apart the building searching for me on a hide-and-seek mission for six hours after I’d found a way to climb into the ceiling. It was too damned bad they’d found me before I could crawl my way into an escape hatch.
The one genuine smile I had was hearing recounts of when I’d sent them to Margo’s ex’s house, telling them that he was my abusive ex who had kept a room of all the items he had collected from his girlfriends. It made my day to hear how they had torn his house apart and kicked his ass for trying to throw his weight around.
However, I had cried wolf one too many times and they weren’t listening to my lies anymore. It was the reason why I had a death grip on the small multi-tool in my hand. It was fueling my determination to find a way out of this place. I had managed to snatch it from one of the guards who’d had to subdue me on my last escape attempt.
Hence, the reason why they were keeping me calm with drugs. However, each time that shit started to wear off and I could think, I was calculating a plan. I doubted I had enough strength to walk, but I didn’t care. If I had to slide out of this bitch on my ass, I was finding a way.
“Finally,”I whispered. After hours of sitting there, it felt like I had enough strength to stand. I stared into the shiny black lens of the camera in the corner of the room and smiled, knowing they were watching.
They didn’t want me dead yet, an important piece of information I had discovered the first day. The information would play a crucial role in my latest escape plan. I lifted the blade I had unfolded from the tool, ensuring they saw what it was and sliced it across my neck.
It only took five seconds for two guards to come barreling through the door. Good thing for me they had left it wide open. The blood they saw pouring down my neck was my own, but I hadn’t sliced my neck. It had taken me days to siphon enough from small cuts I had been inflicting on my body to collect in one of the small Ziploc bags they delivered my sandwiches in.
I played my role, lying there twitching and listening to the men shouting instructions at each other.
“Call for a medic!” the one holding my shoulder shouted at the other one standing next to him.
They were staring down on me with fear-ridden faces like their lives depended on my survival. As soon as the man lifted the walkie-talkie up to his mouth, I tensed and pooled all my strength into the upward stab I sent into the neck of the one holding my shoulder. I twisted the knife, opening the vein I had tapped into before jerking the blade free.
He stumbled away, clutching at his throat with his wide-eyed gaze cast on me. The other fool dropped the walkie-talkie from his mouth and went for the weapon on his hip, the same pistol my eyes had been on since he had stepped into the room.
My fingers were death gripped around the butt while he hammer-fisted the hell out of my arms to get me to let go. Since half my body was leaning over the edge of the bed, the position gave me the pulling power I wouldn’t have had otherwise. My good friend, adrenaline, had also kicked in and given me a boost of energy I desperately needed. When I felt the pistol slipping from the holster, my finger went searching for the safety release and trigger.
The man still hadn’t given up the fight. He kept a bruising grip on my arms to keep me from shooting him. He dragged me from the bed and I hit the floor with a hard, body-bruising thud that snatched me from his grip and left me open to take aim and shoot.
He came at me in a fury-inspired rush that hinted at his intent to kill. The first blurry-eyed and shaky shot I fired off caught him between the neck and shoulder, knocking him back and away from me, but he didn’t fall. Shock had a strange way of making you calm at the most insane of times. He stood there, blinking at me with a thick stream of blood squirting from the wound.
The second shot wasn’t as friendly as the first, punching a hole in his chest before sending a strong gust of internal organs through his back. He tumbled to the floor, seized a few times, and embraced his final stillness. The man had something I desperately needed, so I crawled over to him, unclipped his knife from his waistband, and prepared to take it.