Page 125 of Serpentine
MILES
You know when something isn’t right. Even when you’re in those first moments of wakefulness. The room feels off, or your body feels off. This is just like that.
The energy surrounding me feels tense, and the air is cold. My eyes are heavy, and one is swollen and nearly shut. When I move, I hear the bed creak and groan beneath me. My body feels the aches of the crash that I can barely recall. Flashes of being dragged into a van echo in my subconscious, along with the sting of a needle. That was before the world faded away.
When I finally open my eyes and can get them to track, I find the room dingy and weathered. The chill is from the window that’s busted open. It looks like someone tried fixing it with plastic once, but the sheeting is long and worn, blowing in the frigid breeze. I try to sit up, but the pain is too mighty to fight against. My ribs feel shattered, but I wouldn’t be able to move even if I wanted to—my wrist tugs against a metal cuff that keeps me firmly anchored to the bed’s railing. Further inspection tells me I’m in an abandoned hospital.
As the moments pass, everything I’d been worried about before the van ran me off the road descends on me, weighing me down. Aella did not answer. Braxton is flippant. Our mission is up in the air since we’ve gotten so far off track.
All that fades into the background when Vito Murphy enters the room. He’s an imposing figure, sure. He’s nothing like Braxton or myself, but I’m confident he thinks he’s tough. There’s a hand tattooed around his throat as if choking him. He’s got dark hair, soulless eyes, and a smirk born of the Devil himself as he strides into the room like he’s the king of the fucking world.
We have a working theory that The Jackals didn’t want Cobras in their territory because of all the information Braxton has been diligently digging into. The drugs. It’s much more profound than me fucking his sister atop a bathroom sink. However, that didn’t help matters any.
I smirk inwardly. “All this because I fucked your slut of a sister? She should’ve told you I like to be tied up. Makes me so fucking hard.”
His face changes as his hand reaches up to remove the toothpick he’d been chewing. Stepping closer to the bed, he looks like that teasing line will make him snap and forget his mission as it was intended. I need information, and he will only give it up if I throw him off his game.
“Boss,” a man behind him warns, a meaty hand coming down on Vito’s shoulder.
Vito shrugs him off. “You haven’t learned your fucking lesson, Bardot, have you? You leave my family alone!”
I sit up as far as the cuffs will allow, not wanting to feel like the prisoner I currently am as I try to find a way off this fucking bed.
They’ll have stripped me of weapons, so I’m going to have to use brute force. Force I don’t fucking have at the moment.
“This isn’t about your fucking sister, and you know it isn’t. So, why don’t we just cut the shit!” I deadpan at him, and his jaw ticks; a tell I can work with.
“You don’t know shit,” he spews.
I smirk. “Then why am I here?”
People don’t kidnap people they think are unaware of their dirty deeds. He knows I know something, but he doesn’t know what. If he knew what I knew, I’d be dead.
“String him up,” Vito growls, turning and marching from the room.
The remaining man is massive, but his face grimaces at Vito’s order. “Fuck, man.”
I sit straight proudly. “Don’t bitch out now. Finish the fucking job.”
At the very least, I’ve escalated my torture to a tolerable level because I’m living like this, tied to this bed, probably bleeding internally until I drown in my blood, which isn’t the way I want to go.
I should’ve kept my fucking mouth shut.
That’s the line that I’ve been repeating over and over in my head as two men dragged me to the morgue and into a cooler. It’s been transformed for their purposes. I can smell the stale blood that remains ingrained in the space long after they’ve tried to bleach it.
But one by one, they pierced my skin with meat hooks, four of them. Once I was secure, they hoisted me into the air and left me to hang. Eventually, my skin will break, and I’ll drop to my death. That’ll be a mercy. One I’m praying comes soon.
I’ve been floating in and out of conciseness, Aella and Braxton’s images coming to me, giving me solace.
When Vito enters the cooler, the other two men stay posted outside it. The door closes behind him, and he takes me in. Something on his face says he doesn’t have the stomach for his job.
“You shouldn’t have pushed me,” he grumbles.
Clearly.
I keep my thoughts to myself, and my mouth firmly clamped shut.
“You need to learn to keep your dick to yourself.”