Secrets Are For Keeping

Chapter Forty-Two

I'd fallen asleep at some point during the car ride.

I didn't know when, or even how I could've with the anxiety that was coursing through my veins. But I had.

And I'd woken up in a cell.

The walls were a dark gray and made of stone. There were no lights in the cell, and the only light that allowed me to actually see my surroundings came from light fixtures in the hallways outside of the bars of the cell. Bars being thick metal poles that sprung from the floor to the cell's ceiling. It felt extremely old fashioned and I wondered if it was because they just really didn't care about their prisoners and decided that it was no use spending extra money on making the cells more likable.

Beyond the bars I could make out other barred areas, other cells. I couldn't tell if anyone actually was in any of them, but I couldn't hear anything else so I guessed not. Inside my own cell the only furniture was two identical beds, one on either side of the windowless room. They were both made of metal and had cheap mattresses on top with nothing else. No pillows or blankets. I could already tell that they wouldn't be too comfortable to sleep in.

I leaned back against the stone wall, feeling coldness spread through my shirt and onto my back. I was still wearing my clothes from before, and they looked dirtier than ever. Nothing moved outside the cell and the only thing moving from within it was my heart beating and my chest pulsing up and down in time with it.

Then I heard footsteps coming down the hallway. Slaps of sneakers hitting against hard floor. I stood up quickly, more alert than I was before. It had to be an inspector coming to take me away. I considered trying to make a weapon out of the few things that were in my room, but realized that there was nothing that I could use. Both the beds were bolted into the ground and the frames didn't have anything that I could pull off, unless I was able to break metal which I wasn't.

Throwing a mattress at the inspector probably wouldn't do anything either, and only would make me lose the mattress that I'd have to use to sleep in. I could always take the other mattress, but then there was another problem: I doubted the mattress would actually harm the inspector. It was a mattress, after all, and the purpose of a mattress was to be soft enough to sleep on.

I couldn't even use anything I had on me to my advantage since it was just pants and a shirt, nothing that was any sharper than the mattress would be.

And then the footsteps stopped in front of my cell and I heard tiny beeping noises of buttons being pressed. I looked up and saw a brown haired inspector typing something into a keypad and then opening the door.

He walked towards me robotically and grabbed both my hands. He pulled them behind my back before I could even fight back and then what felt like a zip tie was tightened around my two wrists. He grabbed my upper arm and began pulling me towards the opening in the cell. I went along, not having any other real choice. What could I do? My hands were zip tied together and I couldn't just run away.

I was taken down identical gray hallways until the man stopped in front of a gray painted metal doorway with a random assortment of letters and numbers on it. He took out a key card and swiped it next to a keypad on the side of the door, then pressed in a couple numbers that I couldn't see because his hand was covering the entire keypad.

The door clicked as it unlocked, and the inspector pulled it open. He walked inside, still pulling me along.

The room was completely white in contrast to the dark gray cell I'd been in. It reminded me only slightly of the cell I'd been kept in earlier when they'd first imprisoned me. The difference was that this room was a much brighter white and...

...someone was standing in the middle.

I blinked a couple times, thinking that I was hallucinating it and I was actually in the room completely alone.