Page 15 of The Harbinger
Another lightning bolt licked across my belly, this one less painful than the first.
“Sleep, Mia.”
“You’re awfully bossy.”
Vlad coughed, and Sacha leaned forward, his thumb and finger gripping my chin. “And it’ll do you good to listen.”
I gulped down the chill settling against my spine as he returned to his phone, leaving the warm remnants of his hand against my chin.
Pulling the blanket up around my shoulders, I closed my eyes and silently suffered the raw pain in my belly.
Chapter 4
Mia
Thegirlstaredbackat me, her pitch-black eyes swallowing the whites, her nightgown stained with filth and grime. Her cracked lips moved, and whispers filled the hollow air around me.
“Who are you?”
She stood swaying as if on fast forward, her gown moving along with her, then her mouth gaped wide as her hand slammed against the glass between us, shuddering the earth around me, the ground quivering with her banshee-like scream.
The lights flickered, and her haunted figure diminished, leaving my replication in her place.
My skin was slicked with sweat, and my heart pounded against my chest, which only kicked up an extra notch when his two darkened eyes burrowed into me from behind, warping my mind with an intensity that burned me to the core.
A cold wash ran down my spine as I sucked in a deep breath and turned away from my mirror image.
“Where am I?” I whispered as I searched the room for familiarity, the wall of mirrors at my back.
“We’re about to land in Moscow,” Sacha said, his body so close that he radiated heat like a river of lava carving up the mountainside.
“I…”I’d slept through Alaska?
“You sleepwalk.”
His matter-of-fact tone rippled around me, slowing my wild pulse.
Jenny said when she’d closed her eyes, her mind told her stories of faraway places, where she was the hero riding in to save the day or where her demons fell at her feet.
I’d never seen what she’d described.
“I think I do.”One. Two. Three.“It’s only happened a few times.”
Sacha stood with his hands in his pockets, his foot turned to the side as he balanced on the other. His relaxed demeanor lowered my defenses, making me want to open up to him and spill every horrible thing I could remember. How would it feel to share the disturbing thoughts inside my head?
“And what happened when you did?”
“Um…” I swiped my hair away from my face and frowned at the sweat slicking my clean skin. Where did my towel go? The one around my chest remained firmly intact. “I walked into the street once and woke up to car horns and lights.” I nearly had a heart attack when I awoke to a car careening towards me, their horn blaring and tires screeching. He’d stopped mere inches from my dirty knees. “And then the other time wasn’t far from my bed under the bridge.”
To be fair, there were more instances, but I couldn’t account for all of them. I’d been free from that hellhole for eight days, and now it appeared I’d traded one captivity for another.
The speakers crackled a moment overhead. “Eto vash kapitan, zaymite svoi mesta.”
“You have two minutes to get dressed.” He pointed to a stack of clothes on the end of the bed.
I walked around him, slipping the shirt over my head first while leaving the towel in place, then searched for the underwear. “Where is the—”
“You won’t be needing them.” He glanced at his watch. “You have one minute.”