Possibility of the Future

Chapter Twelve

Unedited.

Chapter Twelve

Part of my training involved waking up and knowing exactly what was going on around me. Moments of confusion were whittled down until they were mere milliseconds. I had to always be aware. Even if I was unconscious. You never realize how exhausting that is until you wake up after being dosed with chloroform.

It takes a bit to get your wits back. My brain swam, my mouth felt like a desert. Disorientation to the point I wanted to vomit. And the moment it sank in that nothing around me was familiar, a little bit of panic hit.

I'm not used to panic. Upon waking each morning, I knew what to expect and where I was. Because I was always in the same place, same state of being.

Now, now the world was thrown into the unknown. I understood nothing anymore. The one person I thought I could trust, the only person I'd come to rely on, was a stranger.

The betrayal stung. Tears flooded my still closed eyes. And my heart—for the longest time I thought that particular organ was dead. Now I knew better. Because along with the pain I felt over this treachery, I also felt anger. White hot and blistering. It burned away the lingering bits of confusion caused by the chloroform.

If this didn't teach me not to trust anyone, I didn't know what would.

There was no sound in the car and the noise of the highway was muted. No radio. He had me laid out across the back seat. My legs were bound at the thighs, calves, and again at the ankles. My hands were tied behind my back. He wasn't taking a chance with this.

Smart man.

I searched out the bond. I could feel it muted in the background but I couldn't reach it. Something blocked me. Panic threatened to take over again. The last time I'd been without the bond—

"I'm going to stop." His voice ripped through the quiet causing me to flinch. "So we can get you resituated and more comfortable. But you have to promise not to scream."

I grunted. It took him five minutes to pull over. I plotted his death several times in the duration.

But then he sat there for a few seconds. On the side of the road. What he thought about, I had no clue. Maybe he had second thoughts. The death plots switched to endless possibilities of escape and why he would do this in the first place.

He got out and opened the door by my head.

We stared at each other for a good two minutes.

Maybe he wanted to remind me of our strange connection. I'd never made much of it, never wanted to look too closely at it. But now—now I wanted to dissect it and find out if it had anything to do with his current behavior.

He hauled me up by the armpits until I sat in the seat properly.

"Promise not to scream?"

I glared, letting that convey my answer. Did he really think I wouldn't? Then again what would it accomplish? I may not have looked outside the window yet but I doubted he would pull over somewhere with other people. Whatever was going on, he wouldn't want witnesses.

He hooked his finger around the cloth gag and paused, knowing better but deciding to get it over with.

I screamed the second it came out of my mouth.

He let me.

An infinite amount of patience shined out of his eyes until I stopped. After that, my throat felt raw, sore, reminding me of how stupid it was to scream. We sat there in silence, me huffing and glaring, him—just watching. What did he want from me? Why did he kill all those people? How did he get me out of Sword & Arrow without getting caught? What the hell did he do to the bond?