Moon, Bitten

Chapter Two

The next few nights she slept restlessly. She'd awaken in the dead of the night fearful of the shadows that occupied her room, her body soaked and her thoughts in shambles.

She knew her shattered dreams were reoccurring images of what had led to her this point. They were consistent, frightening and always with a faceless man that terrified her.

The man's identity was a mystery but she knew he was dangerous and the reason she was in a hospital.

She fell asleep every night with tears on her pillow, musing over the child she had lost. Was the faceless man the father?

Her fears hastened all the more as she considered the horrific possibilities that rendered her to a bed.

Had she been raped?

Beaten?

Kidnapped?

Her anxieties magnified all the more whilst her memory failed her.

Little by little fleeting images came to her and the more her battered mind tentatively revealed, the more terrified she became.

A full week in bed she finally managed the strength and mustered the courage to face a mirror.

Against Dr. Jenson's orders, it took her a grueling fifteen minutes to unravel from the bed onto unsteady legs, her hospital gown hanging like a parachute on her startling thin frame. Gripping her IV stand as a support system, she sought a mirror; her steps deliberate and slow as each movement caused ample pain.

The image she found forced a sharp, audible gasp from her throat.

She stood there for a considerable time, daunted.

The face was alarmingly pale which pronounced the blue and black that covered it. Her hand trembled as she raised it to the eyes peering hauntingly back at her, the features unrecognizable beneath many discoloring bruises.

With trembling hands, she pushed hair from her temple to reveal a rather large, nasty gash.

Gingerly, she pressed a finger over her split lip, its tenderness causing her to wince.

Her eyes then settled on her swollen throat and she sucked in a breath.

Marred with bruises and a distinguishable redness that gave way to a number of scratches as well as an ominous bruising of hand prints, she realized, horrifyingly that someone had tried strangling her.

It rendered her stunned and immensely terrified.

Her hand shaking she pressed it to the flatness of her belly, imagining a baby nestled there as all the horror now grimly displayed to her body had occurred, sealing her unborn child's fate.

Gasping for a sudden breath, she pivoted abruptly from the mirror which wrenched a cry from her throat.

Agonizing pain seized her and she clutched at her cracked ribs.

Unshed tears blurred her vision as she sought her bed.

She took a step and crumpled to the floor.

It was her second week of being confined to a bed that a man came to visit her.