Bad Decisions

•NINE•

When Aurora came to, she could feel the itch of rough fabric along her skin, instead of the fine material her black dress had been made of, and she couldn't feel the pinch of her Louboutins on her feet. Instead, she wiggled her toes in the open, stagnant air.

Her head throbbed, like her brain was crashing itself against her skull with every heartbeat. She was laying on a cool, hard slab of concrete, and her hands skimmed over the hardness of what she lay on, noting that it definitely was not her soft bed at home, and she absolutely was not in her pink silk pajamas, and she totally wasn't at home, and none of this had been a nightmare, like it should have been.

She opened her eyes up to see a single incandescent light set into the ceiling, far out of her reach. She sat up and looked down at herself, and almost vomited from the ghastly orange jumpsuit she wore, the elastic tight at her waist. She already knew it was gone, but the leather holster she wore tucked under her clothes was missing, along with the single knife she tucked high up on her thigh before she left her apartment.

Rage screamed through her, and she stood up, only for the blood to rush to her head and she collapsed over, falling hard on her hands and knees. She breathed in through her nose, and out through her mouth.

"It'll wear off soon."

The simmering rage ticked up to burning hot at the sound of his voice, and she tilted her head up to peer at him through the glass in the steel door.

"Why the fuck," she hissed, her voice low, "am I here."

He leaned on the door, the only exit point, the rest of the room brickwork.

He looked pained when he shrugged. "There's this pesky little update going out soon for the computers in the clinics. We need to stop that."

"Why the fuck would I help you after you dragged me here? How the fuck do you know there's an update? Why the FUCK am I here?!" The last question came out as a shriek making her head throb as it echoed around the solid room.

Noah leaned down and rested his arms on the door, his elbows crossed on the shelf that the slot opened up to. He let his head rest on his crossed arms. 

"You have an access code. It gets you everywhere in the building. Even the server rooms. Very few people have those codes that get them access like that, and we need it so we can stop the server updates, and also to kill the computers at the clinics."

"I like being alive, thank you," Aurora said, rising from her knees and coming to lean on the shelf in the door also.

"C'mon, not even for me?" Noah asked, sliding his hand through the slot to brush against her arm. She yanked it away and stood up. "For everything we shared? Our history?"

"We are nothing," she said, stepping away from the door. "We don't have a history. So fuck you."

"Is that an open invitation?" He asked, stepping away from the door too. Aurora scoffed and flipped him the finger. He turned around and spoke to the shadows. "She is deadly. No one but me gets in there. She will kill you, but she won't kill me."

He turned in a circle, and she caught the visage of a dark shape in the shadows beyond her cell.

"And no one fucking touches her. Or I'll kill you myself while she watches."

And God damn it did it make her pussy fucking ache, it was so hot. And then she questioned why she was turned on, considering what he just did to her.

She sat down on the concrete slab, and crossed her legs to think.

There was no good way out of this. She could give him her access code, but that meant she was a dead woman. She could just not give him her code, but that meant probably rotting away in this cell.