Locks and Keys

Chapter 23

My head was pounding and my throat was so dry it had closed up. I swallowed, trying to get rid of the horrible feeling, but it only made me realise how thirty I was. I felt my forehead scrunch up as I tried to remember what had happened, but nothing came to mind. I tried to move my hands to rub my head, but something had restrained them. The more I tugged against it, the more the skin around my wrists burned. My eyelids began to flutter open, but a burning white light hanging from the ceiling, blinded me and made me flinch and clench my eyes closed again until they had adjusted to it. The echo of footsteps faintly reached my ears and I forced my eyes open, only to see a silhouette of a figure at the edge of the shadows.

"Hello, Vanessa, or should I say Key. It's good to see you're finally awake, so let's get down to business." Saida familiar voice. I squinted my eyes against the light as the figure the voicebelonged to stepped into the halo of light my chair was positioned in. A mess of dark hair that I would recognise anywhere was the first thing that game into my fuzzy eyesight.

"Ava?" I said in a horse voice, my vocal chords rubbing together to make my throat feel scratchy and horrible, so I tried to cough out the feeling.

"Oh shut up, Key, why don't you just die more quietly than trying to attention seek with your annoying cough." Ava sneered, a baseball bat swinging freely in her hand.

"But I thought Kasey was behind all this." I said, feeling more confused than before. I never would have suspected Ava to be behind this.

"Oh, please, you read the texts she sent you, she can't even grammar correctly, let alone get all this prepared." Ava snorted.

"Hey! Don't think I didn't hear that." Kacey's voice reverberated from across the room.

"It's true." Ava muttered, before turning back to me.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked, squirming in the chair, trying to unwrap myself from the bindings. I could feel that they had left my phone in my back pocket, so I stretched my fingers to try and reach it.

"Well, Kacey did this because she's obsessed with all the guys at school, which you probably already know; and I did this because I don't like you."

"That's your reasoning? Threaten my family, my best friend and me, all because you don't like me?"

"Well, it's more than that, but that's just the basic summary." She agreed, picking out dirt from underneath her fingernails. I used this distraction to grasp onto my phone and pull it out from my back pocket. It wasn't my iPhone, which made it easier for me to figure out which buttons were which, allowing me to text someone a lot easier. I pressed the home buttons and scrolled to the messages button from memory, imagining where the icon was in my mind and then clicking to it. I knew the last person I had messaged was Lock, so I immediately clicked the centre button again and then ran my hand over the number buttons to find the letters I wanted. The amount of times I went through the alphabet was more than I could count. I just hoped it made a lick of sense. Once I thought I had written 'In a warehouse somewhere, Kacey and Ava evil', I sent the message and slid the phone back into my pocket; all the while, Kacey and Ava had been arguing about Kacey's intelligence or lack there of.

"Do you have any water that I could drink? My throat feels like its been without water in a desert." I asked, trying to sound casual and blasé about it.

"No." Ava stated blankly, before going back to argue with Kacey.

"Well, fine then, let me dehydrate and die." I muttered.

"To be honest, Key, I wouldn't mind that at all." Ava called over and I rolled my eyes. For some reason, I was all too calm about the situation I was in. I knew I needed to buy myself some time, so that Lock and Ollie could somehow find me.

"You never told me the reason behind you hating me." I interjected in the girls' argument and they both turned and looked at me.

"I think I made it pretty clear to you in those messages that I wanted you to stay away from Ollie and Trent, but did you listen? No!" Kacey huffed, crossing her arms over her low-cut top.

"You also told me to stay away from my own brother, who I live with and spend most of my every waking moment with. How is that logical?" I retorted, which caused Kacey to raise her baseball bat with resentment on her face.

"Hold your horses, Kacey, we need her alive, for now. But to answer your question, Key, I hate you because you took everything from me."

"I took nothing from you, all I did as join the school!" I protested.

"And that's exactly how you ruined everything. Who do you think were my friends before you showed up, who was going to ask me out before you stuck your foot in it."

"I thought Emily was your best friend?"

"Oh, please, all that ginger airhead does is talk about Kent." Ava rolled her eyes, once again swinging the baseball bat to and fro, but this time, getting dangerously close to my face.

"Would you mind swinging that away from my face?" I chuckled, nervously, which only made Ava smirk.

"And why's that? Incase this happens?" She asked innocently, before letting the bat swing backwards with a greater momentum than it originally did and then it swung back towards my face. I tried to lean away, but I was unsuccessful and a sickening crack resounded throughout the room and along with it, came a torturous pain; it radiated through my skull, making my vision go fuzzy and my brain pound. Tears began flowing from my eyes, which only made my vision get worse than it already was, as the salty drops mixed with the oozing substance that was gushing from my nose.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did that hurt?" Ava said in a patronising tone. "Does this hurt?" She raised the bat and swung it downwards. I felt an excruciating pain and then darkness.