After I hit her a couple more times, her eyes fluttered, and a pained moan came from her throat. “What? What happened?” She was more affected by the drug than I was, so she struggled to grapple with reality.
I metabolized stuff much quicker because I was furious rather than scared.
But also scared…
“We’re in a wagon.”
“A wagon?” she whispered. “Going where?”
“I don’t fucking know, but we aren’t going to find out. Turn around so I can get these ropes off.”
She groaned as she turned over, and then we both bounced off the wood when the wheel hit a rock in the road.
I scooted down and used my teeth to work the rope, to wet it enough to turn slippery and get it over her wrists, but the knots were tight, the rope was thick and scratchy, and I wouldn’t get her free even if I did this for a month straight. “I can’t get it.”
“Let me try.”
It was totally hopeless. If I couldn’t do it, then she definitely couldn’t, but I didn’t argue and turned over.
After a couple tugs, she gave up. “It’s too tight.”
I lay there, wearing different clothes than I had before, beige pants and a thick matching jacket. But the clothing wasn’t enough to keep us warm when we were exposed to the air like this. The sunshine wasn’t enough either. I didn’t focus on the fact that someone had changed me when I was unconscious. I didn’t even ponder what else had happened in that time frame, a span that was undetermined. Was it days? A week? Or just a few hours? There was no way to tell.
I assumed we were being trafficked, but that didn’t explain the wagon. Unless we’d been bought by some weirdo who preferred to spend his life living out a western fantasy.
My sister’s quiet voice came from behind me. “What now?”
I stared at the opposite end of the wagon, absorbing the vibrations of the transportation, feeling that sense of calm in the face of danger because there was no chance of survival. There was just peaceful acceptance, cutting the line of grief and moving right to the front.
I rolled to my back and sat up, raising myself high enough to see what was in front of me. The person driving the cart sat on a solid wooden seat, so his body was hidden from view. If I wanted to attack him, I’d have to crawl over the structure, and being completely bound like this would make that impossible.
I turned around to look at the way we’d come.
It was a weathered path with deep tracks through the thin layer of snow. Trees were on either side, thinned out because the leaves had fallen in the fall and the snow had covered it shortly afterward. I stared in each direction, but I didn’t see anything for miles…and miles.
I faced forward again, and in the distance was the only marker to tell me where we were.
The French Alps.
That meant we were close to the Spanish border, northwest of Italy, if there was this much snow. The remote location and the odd choice of transportation told me there would be no tourists on our way, no police officials, that wherever we were going probably wasn’t even on a map.
It was stupid to check because I already knew the outcome, but I wiggled my body and rolled around in the hope of finding something in my pockets.
“What are you doing?” Melanie whispered.
“Checking for something in the pockets.” I wiggled and moved and found nothing. There was nothing in the back of the wagon either, not even a rock to cut the rope with. All we could do was wait for whatever was supposed to happen to us.
Samantha was smart, so she’d probably witnessed the conversation outside, and when she didn’t hear from me in a day or two, she would call the police and tell them what she saw. The cameras would probably pick up the license plate of the men who took us, and if they still had the vehicle, that could be a lead.
But I suspected this wasn’t their first kidnapping, and they no doubt swapped out the license plates or ditched the car altogether. They were probably the scouts that hunted the women and handed them off to the buyers.
The saliva in my mouth was acidic with bitterness, full of resentment. I’d moved across the Atlantic Ocean to start my own life, and the second Melanie visited me, I was stuck in another one of her idiotic messes. I could have stayed on the sidewalk and watched her drive off with the strange men, knowing she deserved whatever happened to her because she refused to listen to my warning—despite all the times I’d gotten her out of trouble.
But I knew that was just the anger talking.