Bought by The Mafia Boss

Chapter 38

**Aedlin POV**

The blackened stars spun in my vision, looking like static on an old tv. Hands were clamped on my body, the blood rushing to my head as things slowly came into focus. Something was over my head. My head. It was pounding as if someone had hit me hard across the back of it.

But I couldn't remember anything. I could've sworn I was at the mall with my friends but now I was thrown over someone's shoulder. Someone who was huffing down a hallway that I couldn't see with a bag over my head. Attempting to move my hands to tear it away, I was met with resistance. They were bound together and attached to my ankles.

I attempted to kick and hit whoever was carrying me, but the bindings made that impossible.

So I screamed.

Or tried to, but there was duct tape over my mouth. The person who was carrying me rounded a corner and I heard a lock click, several locks click as I shoved my tongue between my lips and began licking at the tape. Nasty and bitter. It felt like it had ridges, that same flavor when licking an envelope, except worse.

Small whimpers and gasps reached my ears as I was suddenly thrown off of the shoulder and slammed into the ground. I grunted as a shearing pain shot through me from my right side that had taken the full impact. A sick laughter reached my ears as someone cut my hands and ankles loose.

Tears threatened at the brim of my eyes. Panic slowly rose as I realized I had been kidnapped. Again. Panic mingled with the agony that was continually rushing through my side as I attempted to roll over. The same hands caught my body and then something musty and smelling like smoke crashed against my left ear. Hot breath of someone disgusting.

"Welcome back, b****." The voice whispered. A voice I knew as the bag was ripped off of my head and I blinked back the lights and haze. Once my vision focused, there he was. The nasty older man with straw-like hair.

Before he had a chance to step away, I hucked a huge wad of snot into his face. He froze, shocked, before slowly wiping off of the spit and wiping it across his pant leg. Then he shoved me onto my back and kicked me hard; right against my ribs on the same side that was still pulsing in pain from contact with the ground.

I coughed and curled up into a ball, listening to his laughter leave the room. Squeezing my eyes closed, I attempted to recall what had happened. Faint bursts of images flashed into my head that was pounding with a dull ache.

A flash of me smiling at Lily's dress.

A snippet of me laughing with my roommates.

A blurb of pulling out my phone and excusing myself to the car for a moment to unload some bags.

A flicker of a text. What text? Text to who?

Renzo.

And I sat up, blinking as everything blazed back into my memory. I had been texting Renzo, missing him, about to answer his flirtatious one when the bodyguard that Renzo had sent with me yelled at me to run. But just as I took the first sprinting step, a baseball bat slammed into the back of my head and the last thing I saw as my body slammed into the ground was Brick, bleeding out on the sidewalk behind me.

"No, no." I whispered and placed a trembling hand over my mouth as the room came into focus. After just barely learning his name, he had possibly been killed all because of me. "No." I whispered again as I stared at the blank wall in front of me. A wall I knew. If I just turned around, I would find the two beds and the bucket. I was back in the same room that Renzo had rescued me from before.

I cried out. I was terrified and tears spilled over.

A hand rested against my shoulder and I flew away from it. Startled. Spinning around to face my attacker, I wiped the tears off of my cheeks with fists raised. Fists that I slowly lowered upon seeing his face. Whether it was annoyance, frustration, fear, rage, grief, or all of them that blasted through me I couldn't decipher. But either way, I quickly stood up and backed away.