Property Of A Monster

No Escape

Chapter 7

The car surged forward, engine screaming, and behind them the black cars stayed locked to their bumper like they were tethered by wire. Mary gripped the door handle so hard her knuckles ached, eyes darting between the road ahead and the headlights swallowing the rear window.

Mark's phone buzzed against the console. He glanced at it, one hand still white-knuckled on the wheel, and something in his face shifted, quick and strange, gone before Mary could name it.

*Where are you?*

He typed back one-handed, thumb moving fast. *Your package will soon arrive.*

Mary frowned at the words upside down from the passenger seat, a small cold thread of unease pulling tight in her stomach, but the adrenaline drowned it out before she could hold onto the thought. "Mark, who was that?"

"Just, work stuff." He reached into the console without looking away from the road and pressed a bottle of water into her hands. "Here. Drink. You look like you're about to pass out."

She was shaking too hard to argue. The water was cool going down, almost sweet, and she drank half the bottle in three long pulls before the first wave of dizziness rolled through her, warm and heavy, blurring the edges of the streetlights sliding past the window.

"I feel." She blinked hard, trying to force her vision to focus. "Weird. Everything feels, "

"You're just exhausted." Mark's voice reached her like it was coming from underwater, smooth, steady, wrapping around her like a blanket she didn't remember asking for. "You've been through hell tonight, Mary. Just breathe."

She let her head fall back against the seat, limbs suddenly too heavy to hold up properly, and the words spilled out of her slow and slurred, all the fear and exhaustion of the last few days finally cracking loose. "I've suffered so much, Mark. You don't even know. He, he threatened to kill me.”

"I know." His hand found across the console, warm, familiar, achingly gentle. "It's going to be okay. I promise you. Everything is going to be okay."

The car slowed, turned. Mary forced her eyes open against the pull of whatever was dragging her under, and something in her sluggish, fogged brain snagged on the unfamiliar buildings sliding past.

"This isn't." She swallowed, throat thick. "This isn't the way to my house. And I know it isn't yours either, Mark."

"I'm taking you somewhere safe." He didn't look at her when he said it. That was the detail that finally cut through the haze, small and sharp as a blade.

The car pulled beneath a hotel awning, neon light bleeding red across the windshield. Mary tried to sit up straight, tried to make her limbs cooperate, and failed. Mark came around and half carried, half walked her through a side entrance, up a flight of stairs, down a corridor that smelled like bleach and cheap cologne, and shoved open a door at the end of it.

He pushed her inside. The door clicked shut behind her before her legs even remembered how to hold her weight.

"Mark?" Her voice cracked against the sudden silence of the room. She stumbled toward the door, hands slapping against the wood, fear finally burning through the fog fast enough to matter. "Mark! Open the door! Mark, please, don't do this, open the door!"

No answer came from the other side. Only the fading sound of footsteps walking away.

Mary turned, chest heaving, and scanned the room with eyes that refused to focus properly, until they landed on the man sitting in the armchair by the window. Bald, thick through the middle, somewhere in his forties, watching her with an expression that made every hair on her arms rise despite the drug still fogging her blood.

"Hmm." He rose slowly, unhurried, the way a man moves when he already knows he's got all the time in the world. "I'm really going to enjoy this one." His eyes crawled over her, slow and deliberate, lingering in places that made her stomach turn. "I'm excited to, I am in anticipation of what you have in stock for me."

Mary's back hit the door. Her fingers scrabbled uselessly for a lock that wasn't there.

His gaze dropped to the pale dress still clinging to her frame from the fitting room, and something almost fond crossed his face, the kind of fondness that belonged nowhere near a room like this.

"You really prepared for me." His fingers went to the top button of his shirt, working it loose with unhurried, practiced ease. "In white too."

Disgust rose so fast and so violent in Mary's throat that she nearly gagged on it, the drug in her blood fighting uselessly against every instinct screaming at her to run, to fight, to scream. She pressed herself harder against the door, the wood cold and immovable at her back, and watched him take one slow, unhurried step closer.