Problems of an Invisible Girl

Chapter 34

When Rina woke up she was feeling groggy and her head hurt more than she thought was possible.
She could barely acknowledge any other parts of her body besides the pulsating head.
It felt like there were hammers hitting rapidly inside of her skull and the only thing she could think of was how much she wanted it to stop.

How much she needed the pain to recede because she knew there was something, something important she was forgetting, but it was difficult to concentrate on her own thoughts when her head felt like it might explode at any moment.

Her mouth was dry and her tongue felt as if she had licked sand with it, dry and painful.
All those feelings were unusual in their own right, but together they painted a picture that told Rina that something was terribly wrong.
Her need, her necessity, to know what it was increased even more when she finally started feeling the rest of her body and it wasn't much better than her head.
She felt weak and disorientated but through the fog, she could still feel a sliver of light that told her she had to fight through all those pains and weaknesses and swim up to the surface as soon as possible.
One thing was obvious, she wasn't where she was supposed to be.

Finally, figuring out how her eyes worked, she tried to open them but her eyelashes were stuck together as if someone had put glue on them.
Rina decided to rub away the sleep from her eyes, but the moment she tried to reach her hand up to her eyes she felt a wave of horror swallow her whole.
She couldn't reach her face because her hands were tied to something. When the realization hit her, she knew that she had to focus on opening her eyes although her eyelids seemed to weigh a ton.
It was obvious that her life might depend on it, so she made a Herculean effort to do so.

However, once her eyes were open she wasn't sure that was the case since all she could see was pitch black.
At first, there wasn't even the smallest shape visible that would give her any indication to where she was.
The only thing she could tell was that the place was small, and she wasn't entirely sure how she knew that.
It was as if she could 'feel' how far the walls were.

Soon enough, her eyes adjusted to the darkness, but that didn't bring her any consolation since there wasn't a lot to see.
The outlines of the walls were barely discernible, but they did confirm that she was indeed in a small room.
The second thing she noticed was that there were some rectangular shapes stacked on top of each other, and she could only guess by their size and arrangement that they might be boxes.
That knowledge didn't help her at all, so she decided to try to use her other senses.

First, she started listening intently, trying to discern any noise or any sound at all, but all she heard was dead silence.
That in itself was ominous since there weren't exactly any places in her city that were that quiet.
The only thing she could feel was an overwhelming smell of mold and dust that she associated with old houses that haven't been in the best of conditions.

Screaming for help did cross her mind, but she figured that the only thing that would accomplish was letting the bad guys know she was awake, and she couldn't allow that to happen.
She needed time to think, to make a plan.
If there was any chance for someone to hear her screams, she knew they would have gagged her.

There was one question that her terrified mind was going back to more than all the others and that was who took her and why.
She did have a lot of money but no one actually knew that, so she wondered why they grabbed her.

At that moment, she remembered that her 'friends' had led her into a trap.
The memory made her furious.
"Oh, those backstabbing..." She thought before she made herself calm down.
There were far more important things to worry about, like getting out of the mess she was in, alive.

Being kidnapped should have been her main preoccupation but her mind started drifting off and becoming consumed with the ever oppressive silence of the darkness.
It seemed to her like she was more worried about it than she was about being kidnapped.
The feeling that overtook all her sensations was the one of someone sitting on her chest squeezing her throat with immense power, not allowing any air to reach her poor aching lungs.
Her heart was beating a mile a minute, and she thought that her kidnappers better come in and check on her, or they might have a dead hostage on their hands.
"Haha, wouldn't that ruin their plans!" She thought as she let out a short hysterical laugh.

The sudden intrusion of painful light was welcomed by Rina since the pain it brought was a blessing when compared with the darkness.
As her eyes adjusted to the strong light, it was a relief to see that her kidnappers were mere humans since her mind had already started playing tricks on her, trying to convince her that no human could be that quiet.
"Humans mean noise" the voice had said, and she was glad that she didn't listen to that panicked voice which told her to scream her lungs out.

However, the humans she saw were the ones she was taught to be terrified of the most.
The first guy she saw was to her frightened eyes as big as a mountain and covered all over with tattoos of skulls and guns.
He was everything she feared rolled into one.
There was a huge scar across the left side of his face and a ring that went through his nose glistened in the light almost blinding her with its brightness.

As he entered the room he gestured with his perfectly manicured fingers for the second guy to join him.
The guy with perfect white teeth and bold tattooed head entered the room, and she couldn't decide which one of the two was more imposing.
Her mind went blank and all she could do was shiver in fear and move away from the guys as much as her chained hands allowed her.
When one of them pulled out a gun, her heart almost stopped.

"You are going to do what we say, or we are going to be forced to shoot you. Is that clear?" The bold guy with a tattoo of a skull with bones crisscrossed over it said.
Having lost her ability to speak Rina just nodded in agreement.
Her terrified eyes followed the guys like the eyes of a trapped animal that knew there was no escape.

They got rid of the chains and took her to a nearby room that was much lighter than the one Rina was in.
"Sit down." A stern voice told her pointing at the nearby chair.
"We will put this over your mouth, cooperate and all this will be over soon." The voice went on to say.
Rina obeyed since it was obvious she had no other choice.

When they were finished one of them brought the phone with the video chat on and once Rina saw that her mother was on the other end of the call she became even more frightened because it became clear that it was all about the invisibility and her parents strange past.
She didn't know what happened to her parents in the past, but she knew it had to be very serious since they decided to give up two of their daughters and now it seemed like the bad people had found them.
Rina's fear doubled since she was now afraid for her mother as well.

Although they didn't know each other for long, Rina could feel that Caroline cared deeply about her and that actually worried her.
People often say that there is nothing a mother wouldn't do for her child and Rina hoped that wasn't true since she really didn't want anything bad to happen to hear newly found mom.
She had just found someone who truly loved her for who she was, and she wasn't ready to lose that, she wasn't ready to let go of the dream of having a caring mother.

After the call, the man took her back to the dark room, but this time they left the light on and Rina thought of it as a reward for not misbehaving.
Whatever it was, she was just happy that she was no longer plunged in darkness, both in the literal darkness and in the darkness of not knowing.
It was strange, but knowing at least a little about what was happening actually made her feel better, and she started thinking of a plan, any plan, that would get her back her freedom.