The Return

Chapter Forty Five

Scarlett

She yanked against the plastic cable ties bound to her wrists and ankles. They seethed like a dying flame.

It was clear she was left for dead, naked in the corner of a tight room. She once read in an article somewhere that assailants were always the closest people to the victim. These were people Scarlett allowed herself to be vulnerable to. One of them had seen her naked for God's sake... well now, all of them had.

The only thing Scarlett had to cling to was the fact that they weren't going to kill her. Malcolm confirmed that. Little by little, wound by wound, they were going to humiliate her and make her regret ever setting her sights on Nathan Pinbrough.

They only wanted her pain. To hear her strangled scream.

It was nothing more than another one of their sick pranks.

She let her swollen eyes settle on the room. There was a surround sound system by the far wall, a distasteful checkered couch, an air mattress, and a body slumped over it... Wait... what?

She held her breath, listening. Snoring. She stiffened.

The room reeked of dried blood and cheap booze.

She searched for any identifiable piece of clothing. A button-down, a pair of pants, anything to hint who was on the couch?

Sweat and tears mixed on her bruised face. What was she going to tell Jenna-Sue?

She seemed out of reach and with each passing second of blood matted into her thick tangled hair, she missed her mother.

Cold wafted across her bare torso and she wondered how far they took their sick joke? They already fastened laundry clips to her hard sore nipples. God, she didn't want to envision each of them taking turns with her unconscious body.

Her legs squeezed shut. She felt sick to her stomach and stifled a fresh jolt of warm tears. At least, she couldn't get any lower than being beaten up in a random Chicago parking lot and raped multiple times in her ex-boyfriend's basement.

She looked down, writhing at the patches of dried blood that stained her thighs. Her panic deepened.

Monsters. All of them.

She let out a hysteric chuckle, her head falling back. Her eyes widened; the gag was off. She listened for the snoring...

The guy was out cold.

How long had she been there?

"Wakey, wakey," The basement door creaked open and light poured into the room. She winced and crawled into the darkness. Steps squeaked beneath Lucas's stride.

"I gotta ask, Princess," He crouched down in front of her, and with two fingers tilted her chin upwards.

She spat in his face. 

He stumbled backward. She pushed him on his back like a roach and stumbled onto her feet and bolted hopping and waddling up the stairs.

He caught her easily by the third step and flung her onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He was not winning her gentleman-of-the-year award with that attitude.

She bit into the flesh of his back and he slammed her onto the floor and the wind escaped her pipes. "You're a fat pig, you know that? Never mind the thick girl trend. That's a way for society to deal with obese people, like try a salad for once and hit the gym and stop whining for society to accept you." He straddled her, arms at either side of her head. "That my Princess is called reaching."

He placed a kiss on the side of her cheek he ran the metal bar over. It stung like a bitch.

She waited till he trailed a wet kiss down her neck and kneed him where the sun didn't shine.

It was one thing to pull that when she was limp and helpless. She wasn't going to watch him defile her body.

She lunged for the stairs again. This time, she made it out the door and into a narrow hall. Where the hell was Whitney Kent in all this?

The woman hardly left her house but the day her son took in a hostage, she was nowhere to be found.

She didn't know how many of them were up there or what weapons they had. All she knew was that she had to run. She crept past the living room ducking behind the foosball table taking advantage of the music thundering through the walls and the darkness in the house. All the drapes were drawn shut. On her hands and knees, naked, barefoot, and silent, she crawled for the kitchen counter. She picked the knife off the wall by the sink.

From there, she vanished up the stairs. The plastic cable ties had to go.

She turned the lock on the door and fell on her butt.

On the bed was another unconscious body, this one Scarlett recognized as Whitney Kent.

She stifled a shriek. By the bed were crouches leaned against the wall and a wheelchair tucked in the corner.

She heard banging against the door.

"It's me," Malcolm whispered. He sounded groggy. "Open up." She could hear his frantic breathing.

"Lucas is crazy. I didn't think he would take it this far." He paused. "When I told him... he didn't even care. He suggested we find you and talk to you," He continued. He fiddled with the doorknob. "Look, I didn't know what to believe when I heard the rumors. I felt like I wasn't enough like I was a joke to you."

Her instincts told her to check on the cataleptic woman on the bed.

Sooner or later, he would break it down.

She clutched the knife tighter in her hands and staggered over to Whitney. She checked for a pulse.

"I love you; Scarlett and I need to know that... that the things people are saying about you is a lie."  

It was faint, but it was there. She was alive.

She started on the zip ties on her wrist. She heard a snap her wrists popped loose and she massaged the tender spots before leaning over and repeating the process at her ankles.

"A teacher, Scarlett...? I picked you because you're not that kind of girl. You're not like that. You wouldn't have an affair with him."

She wasn't going to kill them.

Then why was she armed? To ward them off? Scare them? Hurt them a little if they got too cocky...?

No, that was the easiest way to go to prison for manslaughter. And she would be no better than Ruben Leighton.

She needed to think. To clear her mind and think.

She couldn't be vulnerable, couldn't be defenseless. She needed to live to get away from the bastards who took a sick twisted prank a little too far.

More banging. It was Lucas this time. "You're going to come out and when you do, what we did to you in that basement is going to feel like child's play." She was the one with the knife.

He banged the door. "Fine, stay there but you're going to starve. How long do you think you've been here? You haven't had a bite in days or a glass of water after all that screaming."

She cleared her throat.

"Either we kill you, or the elements do it for us."

What did she know about them? She had to have dirt on at least one of them. Lucas. He was a criminal. No, she needed more than that. His mother always put her deadbeat boyfriends over him and his father was in prison.

Malcolm. The attention seeker. He craved validation. And much like his counterpart, was lacking the endorphins necessary for proper brain development. His mother was nearly a paraplegic and his father left them.

Farida. The gullible, hormonal mess.

Malcolm was Scarlett's only hope, the question was; why wasn't he listening to the voice in his head that urged him to put an end to this nightmare?

He could exonerate himself if he called the police.