Chapter 26
Alexa
I was relieved when Sherry left. I hadn’t wanted to cry in front of her, but I couldn’t hold back anymore. The moment the door closed, I burst out in tears and sat on the floor, sobbing silently. They had beaten Dalton to death. They had punished him repeatedly and then made him pay with his life. And Sherry had been there. She had witnessed it and talked about it like it was something amusing.
How did you get like that? How did you get to a point in your life where you could talk about death and violence like it was no big deal?
Maybe she’d been lying just to upset me. Maybe none of it was true. But somehow, I believed her.
I was still crying when the door opened again. This time I didn’t try to dry my tears. Dalton was dead. He’d died the worst death imaginable, a death at someone else’s bare hands, and I was running out of strength to deal with it all.
It wasn’t Sherry who walked through the door. The man who did was much older, but he moved with agility and had an air of authority about him. I didn’t know who he was, but I was willing to take a bet.
Sherry followed the man into the room, and it was suddenly crowded. The basement wasn’t big enough for the three of us. Or maybe it just wasn’t big enough for me along with my two kidnappers who were the same people who had caused the death of my brother. Personal space was relative to who I was comfortable with.
“Oh, look, Koby, she’s crying,” Sherry said in a mocking tone.
“Shut up,” he sneered at her. She did shut up, but she had a smirk on her face. Him speaking to her like that was clearly not an isolated incident. I guessed we accepted the love we thought we deserved, right?
I looked at Koby again. He was terrifying. He could be the same age as my granddad, but nothing about him was warm and loving. His hair was graying and he had dark eyes, the eyes of someone who could cause a lot of harm, the eyes of someone who would hurt people and not blink. It wasn’t hard to spot eyes like that. You didn’t know them until you saw them, but when you saw them, you realized they were void of life.
He kneeled before me, but even when his face was at the same height as mine, I felt like he was looming over me. He had a terrible scar on his face, and it made him look perpetually mean. I didn’t know how Sherry could be with a man like this, someone who didn’t look capable of love.
“We called Luke,” he said, and my stomach twisted.
“What?” My voice was hoarse.
“We called your boyfriend. He better show his face or we’ll cut up your pretty face before we kill you.”
I whimpered. God, I didn’t want to die, but Luke? I couldn’t lose him. He couldn’t die because of me.
“What do you want with him?” I asked.
Koby laughed, and it was a malicious sneer. “You should have stayed out of this, sugar. You should have left well enough alone. The Samurai won’t let it slide until all the loose ends are tied up. Do you understand me?”
I knew what he meant. He was going to keep killing people until everyone let Dalton’s death go.
I was suddenly furious. How could they mess with people’s lives like that? Who were they to call the shots?
“You won’t get away with this,” I said.
Koby laughed, looking over his shoulder at Sherry. She was grinning at me, shaking her head.
“You stupid bitch,” Koby said. “I’ll get away with whatever the fuck I want. Don’t you know who I am?”
I spat on him. I knew I shouldn’t have done that, but I was suddenly so angry about everything they’d done to Dalton, to me, and about everything they wanted to do to Luke.
Koby wiped his face, looking at my spit on his hand. His face twisted into a snarl, and he pulled back his hand, hitting me with a backhand so hard that I was sprawled on the ground. Sherry let out a high-pitched laugh, but it was muffled due to the ringing in my ears. Koby stormed away, disappearing through the door. He slammed it behind him, and it was just me and Sherry in the room again.
She was staying. I wished to God she would leave, too, leave me alone in my misery.
Sherry sat on her crate again and took out a phone. She started scrolling on it, and I closed my eyes. I felt dizzy.
“Oh, look at this,” Sherry said. “You lost a lot of weight. You’re chubby here.”
I frowned and lifted my head, looking at Sherry. She was still scrolling on her phone. But it wasn’t her phone. It was mine.
“Stop that,” I said. She was going through everything on my phone. It made me feel exposed, oddly vulnerable. That was saying something considering I was tied up on the floor of a basement in the house where Dalton had been killed.
Sherry laughed again. “I wouldn’t have chosen that for a Halloween outfit, but I guess to each their own,” she said.
“I said stop it!” I cried out.
“Or what?” Sherry asked. “You’ll spit on me?” She shook her head, laughing, and turned her attention back to my phone. I felt completely helpless. She sat a few feet away from me with the one thing I could use to get someone to come and help me. And she was laughing at me. I was so frustrated. I wanted to scream. I wanted to break something, hit someone, do something, anything. But I couldn’t because my hands were tied behind my back and I had what could have been a concussion, intensified by the hit I’d taken to the face after spitting on Koby.
“Oh, wow,” Sherry said. “This is interesting.” She turned my phone to me. She was in my downloads folder, where I’d saved a few images of leather straps and harnesses for BDSM outfits. “If I had realized you were into this shit, I would have gotten Koby to tie you up in a more compromising way. Your hands behind you back must be such a disappointment.”
There was nothing I could do.
“What about your messages?” Sherry asked. “Any dirty texts with your squeeze?”
It would be pointless to stop her from reading my messages, so I didn’t respond. I didn’t try to stop her or ask her to put away my phone. I sat with her snickering and sneering at my messages.
“You don’t seem to send Luke very interesting messages,” Sherry said after a while.
“Sherry!” Koby shouted from upstairs, and Sherry rolled her eyes.
“What?” she shouted back. It wasn’t very ladylike.
“Get the fuck up here!”
She groaned. “What did I do?” she called.
“Just get up here!”
She slammed my phone down on the crate.
“Ungrateful son of a bitch,” she muttered and stomped to the door. I watched her as she closed the door and locked it behind her. The phone was still on the crate. I didn’t know how much time I had.
I pushed myself up, getting to my feet. I ignored the spinning in my head, the nausea that came in a wave. I hurried over to the crate, fell to my knees next to it, and tried to grab it with my hands behind my back. I bent my arm, pulling my hands to the side, and looked at the screen over my shoulder. The angle was weird to work my phone this way, but I had to get a message to Luke.
The phone was still opened to his last message. It was like a little gift. I managed to send a location pin to Luke before I heard Sherry’s footsteps on the stairs. I put the phone back on the crate and hurried back to where I’d been, but the door opened and Sherry caught me halfway.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “What did you do?” she asked.
I shook my head. It hurt like a bitch, so I stopped doing it.
“What did you do?” she asked again, her voice rising. She looked at the phone, and I felt my heart in my throat. If she found out, they could move me or do something else to stop Luke from getting here to get me out.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “You were trying to get to your phone, weren’t you? Pity you didn’t think of it soon enough.”
“Yeah, pity,” I said and swallowed.
Sherry laughed and shook her head. “You’re so pathetic.”
I sat down, and Sherry walked to the crate. She picked up the phone and sat down. I hoped she wouldn’t keep going through my messages. She would see the location I’d just sent and I would be in shit.
“God, your phone is so much more boring than I thought it would be. And that’s saying something.”
I ignored the comment. She studied the phone, and I was scared she would start looking at it again.
I hoped the message had sent okay. I’d had to do it so fast, it might not have worked. And if it did? I was suddenly worried that Luke would reply, that he would try to phone me. If he did that, Sherry would realize something was up and I would be in shit yet again.
I hoped he was the type of guy that would figure it out and not reply. Of course, Luke was that guy. He would know what to do and wouldn’t reply to put me in more danger. I would cling to that, cling to the hope that he would come for me and I would be okay. Luke would save me.
“How long have you and Koby been together?” I asked Sherry. I wanted her to start talking again. I wanted to distract her. She looked at me, her eyes suspicious.
“What do you care?”
I shrugged. “You just seem…happy.” I groaned inwardly. “I was wondering how you did it.”
I would rather die than have the kind of relationship she had, but as long as she wasn’t looking at my phone, I would say anything just to keep her talking.
“A little over a year, I guess,” Sherry said.
“He’s a lot older than you,” I said.
“So? He says I’m mature for my age. We understand each other.” She smiled. “We have a connection.”
Right. How many girls who dated older guys said that?
“It’s not often you see guys like that single,” I said.
Sherry shrugged. “He’s divorced. Apparently his ex-wife was a bitch, which is why we get along so well, too. I let him live, you know? They usually say that in your second marriage, you’re the happiest because you’ve made all your mistakes in the first one.”
She started talking about how they met, how she’d always been attracted to bikers and how Koby was the prefect bad boy. My phone was completely forgotten, and that was all I cared about. I was hoping, holding out for Luke to find me, to not reply, to be my hero and come for me like a shining knight riding a white horse.
My head throbbed something terrible and waves of nausea came and went. I felt incredibly sleepy. That was wrong. Even though it was late by now and light wasn’t coming in the window anymore, the only light being from a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, I shouldn’t have wanted to sleep.
I was pretty sure I was concussed. That just made me feel worse about my whole situation, about Dalton and Luke and everything that was going wrong in my life.