Pacifier

🍒Isabelle 🌿

I felt my feet leave the floor before I felt their hand over my mouth or the knife pushing into the skin on my neck.

It was choking me. I couldn't breath before I realised what it was that was scraping my skin. Stinging.

I tried to scream but whoever held me constricted and trapped the way that I was held me completely helpless so that fighting back only made it worse. Only made it easier for them to threaten Larry who, in the moment I'd been snatched from his hands had been attacked by three other lads, all of whom were laying into him now.

I struggled and whimpered against their grip but the harder I fought the firmer their grip on my waist, the more i felt the bruise of the blade against my neck.

"Larry," i cried out watching in horror as they knocked his own knife from his hands and left him unarmed and struggling against them. I closed my eyes watching as two of them restrained him, the third delivering a gut churning kick to his stomach. 

"Where the fuck is your sister?" snapped one of them, gripping Larry by the collar of his tshirt, hauling him up to his feet only to deliver another punch to his jaw when Larry met their eyes, dead in the pupils. 

"I don't have a fucking sister," he said trying his best to throw them aside. 

But there were two of them and only one of them. Larry didn't stand a chance. 

"Tell us where your fucking sister is!" They growled threatening worse than just another crack in the jaw. 

I bit down a scream my eyes wide, my heart thudding in my chest, doing everything I could to wriggle and struggle and fidget. Hoping they would drop me in some kind of confusion but every time they wavered and I slipped their grip tightened, their breath on my cheek warm and sticky. And every time I slid, every time my little buckle shoes scuffed the floor, they pressed the knife a little harder. 

"I don't have a sister," Larry was breathing hard through his nose and when he spoke it came out in grunts. Blood dribbled down his face. Dripped and spattered on the pavement. 

But it wasn't the blood which had chilled me. It wasn't the blood which had left me wide eyed and petrified. Struggling to breath myself. Struggling to hold back my tears. Burning with determination and yet terrified, feeling all my insides slip into some blackhole of a heavy heart. 

It was those words. The words he'd said, the words he kept saying. 

"I don't have a fucking sister!" he snapped again, a little louder, a little firmer. A little more certain that she was in fact dead to him. That he didn't care about her. Didn't care if she lived or died. 

Didn't care if they found her first. 

"Adella Lau, where is she? Tell us where she is or we'll cut this ones throat," 

As they spoke they yanked his head back, forced him to look me in the eyes, forced me to look into his. And I watched, as his eyes rolled back, almost shutting for a second as he drew in a breath, a ragged breath. The kind of breath that must tear your insides. Shred your lungs. Ache and stab at your ribs. 

"Izzy stay still," Larry coughed out as they threw him to the floor and tried to stamp down on his ribs, only for him to snatch at their ankles drag them both down with him. 

But Larry couldn't possibly know what I knew. He couldn't feel what I felt. 

Whoever had a hold of me was holding me carefully. 

Despite my struggling they had managed to keep their grip without slitting my skin, without drawing blood, without harming a hair on my head. 

If they really wanted to kill me they'd have let me slit my own throat.