Changing You ✦ The Sequel

Chapter 48 {Z}

✦ ZACH ✦

I needed to know where I was.

I needed to open my eyes and get up, to get out of here, but my body — sore beyond words — didn't seem to agree with my mind.

I knew I was alone.

It was so tempting to just stay where I was, unmoving, clinging to the idea of sleep as long as I kept my eyes shut, telling myself — fooling myself — that there wasn't any direct threat as for right now.

But the floor was hard like concrete, the room smelt musty and acrid and I felt my body trembling so badly my teeth clattered with it; maybe because the stone cold concrete bit through my clothes and left me freezing. Maybe because the tasering had pulled all the strength from my muscles until they could do nothing but shake. Maybe because I was terrified as hell.

I knew I couldn't stay here, wherever 'here' was. I needed to get moving.

I scolded at the heavy weight dragging at my eyelids and forced them open. I glanced around the room, this time my mind protesting right with my body as it thumped and pounded with an incredible headache. I felt the air catch in my lungs, instantly trying to figure out the 'why' rather than the 'where'.

It was much harder to believe it than to recognise it.

I was home.

In the shed of my own house.

I blinked and blinked harder through the sense of disbelief, but the space was way too familiar to be anything else: the grey brick walls and the bikes in the back — the pastel one being Reese's, the darker one Ryan's — together with the boxes we had never unpacked and the 'defect' freezer; about three feet away from me.

My heart shot up to my throat. I swallowed it down.

While that freezer might have been defect ever since my dad bought it, it had never been empty. And right now it sat in front of me like a treasure; one that hit me with a cold far below the freezer's measures.

I felt my head spinning with confusion, because it could never be possible that they had accidentally locked me up together with the broad, chest-like icebox we stored our weapons in — I could never be that lucky.

And I wasn't. Of course I wasn't.

Seeing the broken lock on the ground right below the freezer and remembering the weapon Camila had used on me, they knew exactly what was stored in here.

But then why the hell put me there, too?

I braced myself to get up, tugging my legs under my body and pushing myself from the ground; and the second I lifted my chest, the second I moved too significantly, a sharp crackling and shocking exploded in my ears and I had already smacked back against the floor.

I saw sparks flash behind my eyelids, and I couldn't tell whether it was my imagination or the electric current shooting from my chest to my eyes.

My body responded faster than I felt it; and it's that second of seeing your own limbs spasming like they're not even yours, like someone is moving them for you, that might have been the worst about all of it.