The Fall of V (The Henchmen MC 13)

I'd see her again.

Come hell or motherfucking high water.THREEFerrynThe trunk opened into darkness. The kind that implied the pitch black of night and the deliberate lack of inside lighting.

Deliberate.

Because they didn't want me to see where I was. Because they didn't want me to be able to look for an escape. Or remember paths for a later attempt at freedom.

But there was more than one sense.

Uncle Cyrus had been the one to focus on that in my training - taking something away from me, teaching me to compensate with other senses. He would blindfold me, then move around me, attacking silently from different angles until I learned the sensation of air displacing itself for a human inhabitant, until I learned that the little baby hairs weren't moving because of some breeze from an open window, but from someone moving in beside me, until I could learn to hear an arm raising in the air to strike me, and stop it. He would shove earplugs in my ears so I couldn't rely on them to hear him coming from behind to attack me.

If you can learn to concentrate without one or more of your senses, you can teach yourself never to be disoriented by the loss of one.

Suddenly, I wished I had taken him up on his offer for more of those classes instead of ditching him to hit up poetry slams or open mic nights.

Hands moved out, closing around my arm just above my elbow, the unyielding pressure making my bones feel small and brittle beneath - a malnourished skeleton in the grip of a vengeful giant.

Fingers curled into delicate flesh, pressing marks into the skin, ones I knew would be there to see hours later, ones that I could run a finger over and still feel an aching memory.

The tree limb known as an arm pulled me from my prison - vomit-filled and putrid, but somehow much more preferable to the outside unknown.

My head wobbled on my neck, weak as a rag doll between two feuding children, making the migraine already screaming through all hemispheres of my injured brain take on a new intensity, white sparks floating across my vision, bile sloshing around ominously in my stomach empty of all other contents.

My shoulder screamed, wrenched unnaturally backward toward the body directing the hand still pressing bruises into my forearm.

My breath hissed out of me, the only show of pain, the only sound I seemed capable of making with my poor, confused body so overtaken by differing pains to be able to express it.

All for the best, I decided when my lower back crashed into the bottom of the trunk as my body was pulled fully outward, my traitorous legs refusing to hold my weight, the muscles turning to dust as my feet touched the ground. Because men like these, evil men, ugly-souled men, they got off on the pain, on your power being given over to them.

As far as it was under my control to do so, I wouldn't give them that satisfaction.

Not even as a disembodied voice chuckled - low and wicked - at my weakness.

"Might have to carry her," the voice commented, making a chill break out over my skin. "Could get a real feel for her that way, know what I mean?"

As if he was being subtle.

And all my brain could really focus on, aside from revulsion that was like a poison eating away at my stomach lining, was I couldn't let him carry me. If he carried me, it would be too easy to get disoriented.

If I could walk, I could count steps, maybe touch things on my way, try to see what was around me even in this inky blackness.

I choked back the sick in my throat, fought the spinning in my head, forced my legs to extend, the muscles to stiffen, to do their job, and hold my weight like they had been doing since I was hardly even a year old.

Work, darnit, work.

The arm around my middle allowed just enough slack for me to test out my legs, clumsy as a newborn foal - or that giraffe baby the internet waited weeks for.

But my knees locked.

My muscles stretched and solidified.

My feet planted.

And this time, my legs didn't buckle, they held firm in a way I had never thought to question their ability to do so before.

Funny, the basic things you can take for granted.

A head not screaming in pain.

A stomach that didn't roll and slosh with each unstoppable thought.

Legs that knew their job.

And freedom.

God, freedom.

Sure, it came with limitations.

It always did.

Rules. Laws. Enforcers of them.

But freedom to break them, to deal with the consequences.

This.

This was a new world.

And I was a clueless babe in it.

If there were rules to follow, I didn't know them.

If there were consequences for breaking them, I was ignorant of what those might be.