There wasn’t anything close by.
The mirror.
But no way could I break it and get a piece of it to use as a knife before one of them grabbed me.
The toilet with a heavy tank was behind them.
And there was just… there was nothing else.
Panic gripped my system as my complete and utter helplessness became clear to me.
If they intended to take me somewhere, or simply rape and murder me right in my own bathroom, they would be able to do that, and I would have very little chance of stopping it.
Still, that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and take it.
I tossed my clothes at Dulles as he approached me, giving me a distracted second to rush past him, intent on trying to get into the bedroom, then down into the house.
If I could just scream out a window or get downstairs, someone would help me.
I had to believe that.
Not all of Primo’s men were bad.
Just these two.
The others would help me.
I just needed to get to them.
Rounding the tub, I grabbed a random bottle of bath bubbles and hurled them with all I had at Dulles who’d swatted the clothes away, and was barreling down on me.
“Fuck’s sake. Enough of this,” Dawson growled. And before I could even register what he was doing, his arm cocked back and sailed right at my face, colliding with the side of my mouth.
The pain was immediate, ricocheting through my whole jaw as my teeth knocked together. One too hard, it seemed, as blood started to fill my mouth even before I slammed down on my side.
Barely registering the impact, I pushed myself up, trying to scramble away, get into a less compromising position.
“No!” I shrieked as hands grabbed my ankles. Blood spilled out of my mouth and onto the floor.
“Hold her fucking still,” Dulles demanded, voice tense.
Knees, and the full body weight of a man much larger than me, pressed down on my back, pinning me to the floor, stealing my breath so I couldn’t even scream as Dawson grabbed my arm twisted, and pinned it to the floor.
I watched in horrified helplessness as Dulles’s hand moved toward my arm with an open needle between his fingers.
A choked whimper escaped me as it stabbed into my vein.
There was a moment of complete disbelief before there was absolutely nothing else.
Consciousness came to me in a weird, dream-like state, making everything feel slow and fuzzy around the edges.
My stomach flip-flopped over itself, making me wonder if I was going to be sick as my arms flailed outward, only to be trapped in the small space I was confined in.
Confusion set in as I tried to access my memories, tried to make sense of where I was, and why I was in there.
My fingers moved out, tracing the material with what felt like a zipper from the top of my head down toward my feet.
A suitcase?
It felt like a suitcase.
No.
That didn’t make any sense.
I mean, yes, my brother had once been a complete unfeeling asshole when we were teens and shoved me in one as a ‘joke’ because I was so small and slight, until he heard me screaming, then pulled me out and apologized profusely while begging me not to tell our mom.
But why was I in a suitcase now?
Even as the thought formed, I could feel the anxiety starting to form. It started as a pressure on my chest, then a strangling sensation around my throat. Following quickly behind that, my heartbeat started to pound so fast it felt like it was going to burst out of my chest.
My hands slammed as my feet kicked, all logic about finding the zipper tag completely abandoned in my panic.
Luckily enough—or unluckily enough, depending on how you were viewing the whole situation—all the fussing had someone coming over and starting to unzip it for me.
But that someone turned out to be a face my gut told me I didn’t want to see, even though I had no real memory of why that would be.
Dawson.
A familiar face.
Someone who was there to save me, surely.
Save me from what, though?
God, what was wrong with my memory?
Everything felt weird and fuzzy and when I looked at Dawson for too long, my vision went weirdly double.
“Dawson?” I asked as I gulped in a deep breath, trying to think past the anxiety from my claustrophobia.
“Fucking shit never lasts long enough,” Dulles grumbled from his position a dozen feet back from wherever I was.
Why couldn’t I remember being put in the suitcase? Surely that was something someone who was terrified of small spaces would remember.
And why was I feeling so weird? Spacey and nauseous, and the double-vision thing that was making the nausea even worse. Like I was somehow in my body, but also outside of it.
That sounded a lot like…
Drugs.
Someone had drugged me?