Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I came back to consciousness slowly.
The feeling was like the inverse of going to sleep under the influence of a drug, something I had experienced many times. My senses came back to me heavily, as if they were swimming through jelly. For a second, I sat there, confused, before the memories hit me like a stray wave.
Blonde, butterflies, traitors. The sound of a knife being unsheathed, a pool of blood, the sound of silence. Windows.
I jerked forward, only to find that I had been restrained by ropes. I knew I was sitting in one of the chairs from our dining table from years of practice. My eyes were covered by a dark strip of cloth, its rough surface scraping against the skin over my cheekbones. It must have been tied on pretty tightly for it to sting like that. I had been gagged, too, with foul-tasting cloth that dug into my cheeks.
The next thing I registered was the pain.
It spread out from the beginning of my spine, at the nape of my neck, and flared out over my shoulder blades, spreading down to my tailbone. The pain was dull, but sharp when I tried to move, and aching, spiking pain that told me I had been sitting in the same position for quite some time. My hands were tied behind the chair, and my shoulders had been pulled back so hard that the muscles around them hurt if I tried to use them. The skin of my wrists stung with the harsh surface of the rope that had been used to tie them, and multiple cuts or wounds had probably opened up there.
Whoever had tied me up had definitely done it without an ounce of mercy.
Realization didn't come to me immediately, and neither did memory—I sat there for a few moments, utterly confused and fearful—and then I remembered.
The fear of the unknown that had been sitting in my heart for the past few seconds became the fear of something much more real. My chest hurt with every breath that I took in, and I sat as still as I possibly could. I could see nothing through the fabric of the blindfold, only vague outlines through the light. I tipped my head back, and bones creaked in my neck.
Panic lit up inside me like a fire.
Stop panicking, I told myself, trying to find a focus point through the fogginess in my head. The eye of the storm, as Jungkook had told me. It's not helping.
I had no indication of which room I was in, but I was probably still downstairs, unless the killers had decided to drag me upstairs to waste their energy. Yes, I was definitely downstairs, because taking me somewhere else would waste too much time, and the killers were smart. They wouldn't waste time, if they knew that the racers could be back at any moment.
It had been dark outside when I had woken up, so it was either still before dawn or they had drawn the curtains. Maybe both. There was nothing I could do to protect myself. The hunting knife had been in my hands when I had been rendered unconscious, so I was weapon less. Not that that mattered. In the way I had been tied up, reaching for something was virtually impossible.
