Misleading The Marquis

32 - Gina Marie

"We need to go!" Bane was shouting and coughing as the smoke continued to pour around them. Gina yanked again where her left wrist was shackled to the bedpost. This must be what hunting felt like for the fox, she thought, yanking again, so that a sharp pain shot through her wrist and she cried out. The room was getting hotter now as Bane tried his luck with the shackle that held her back. He fiddled for a moment, as Gina watched him trying to pull it apart with his bare hands in his desperation.

"You'll have to cut the bed post!" Gina cried to be heard above the chaos of the room as glass lamps exploded from the heat. She'd only seen a fire this hot once before...

"Hang on!" Bane commanded as he climbed onto the mattress beside her. Bracing himself against the headboard, Bam ramed at the wood with all of his strength and the both heard the promising splintering of wood.

"Again!" Gina shouted, but Bane needed no instruction now as he moved backwards to gain force before he rammed into the wood again. Three more times and the head board splintered apart from the rest of the frame. Leaving Gina shackled to only a slightly small piece of furniture than before.

"Can you walk?!" Bane shouted, and Gina could see the sweat mixing with soot as he came to pull her off of the bed, headboard in tow. Together, they awkwardly shifted and pivoted the large piece of wood away from the wall and towards the door. The weight pulled down on Gina's already injured wrist, and pain shot up into her shoulder.

"Bane! It's stuck!" Gina screamed in pain as the bed post caught on the rug just as they rounded the bed. She thought she heard her husband swear as he pulled from his end until the piece jerked free - jerking Gina with it. The weight of her burden set her off balance enough that she stumbled to the floor.

"George?" he called to her again and Gina sputtered, the wind knocked out of her from the smoke and the fall. Pulling herself up on her hands and knees, Gina quickly assessed for broken bones.

"I'm fin-" she trailed off abruptly, staring down at where her hands met the floor.

Black rose petals covered the rug and the stone underfoot alike. LIke a carpet of dread, it stretched as far as she could see ahead into the smoke.

"Bane?" she muttered in a shaky voice, "The roses - "

"I see them," she heard him say, closer to her ear now, "C'mon. We need to go."

They landed together in a heap in the corridor, amid the shouting of voices throughout the household - so at least someone had noticed the fire. Gina felt numbs as Bane's arms encircled her from behind, the bedpost and headboard still shackled to her arm, and they sat together for several minutes in silence on the floor in that way. It had been two weeks since she'd left her rooms, and two weeks since she'd learned of Ben's death.

There had been a small hope in her that it wasn't possible. That she had let her imagination get away from her much too quickly after speaking with Dr. and Mrs. Thorn that day in Hamil. But here she was, shackled to some furniture by her left hand amid a room filled with black rose petals and a house fire of intense degree. There was no other explanation for it... Gina knew she was going mad.

People whirled around her as she stayed there in a fog - someone came to saw off the shackle from her wrist that had been rubbed raw in her struggle to be free, the headboard was taken away to a rubbish pile somewhere probably, and the fire was put out. Everything she owned had been destroyed in the flames.

"We'll send for new clothes in the morning," Blair promised in a crooning motherly voice, Gina just nodded numbly, still sitting on the floor with Bane wrapped around her.

"How did they get in?" Harry asked, his voice low in its fury as he paced the hall, examined her bedroom door.

"They've been here all along," Malcolm answered in a near whisper, exchanging a meaningful look with his brother just over Gina's shoulder. She closed her eyes, tired of their speculation, tired of their talking.

"It was me."