Chapter Six
Serena
“That’s not good enough! I want answers now. And this doesn’t get leaked to the press. We can’t let anyone think they can get to her so easily, right under all of our noses!” My father’s terse voice drags me out of my hazy fog.
My eyes open a crack and slam shut again, blinded by the bright white overhead lights. I try to move my lips, but it feels like they’re glued shut and the lumps of imaginary cotton in my mouth have absorbed every bit of moisture.
I shift my body on the bed beneath me, cringing as a pain shoots down my spine. A tiny moan escapes and I can hear my mother gasp and call to my father.
Where the heck am I?
I force my eyes open the tiniest bit, shielding them with one hand. I let out a yelp, my hand falling back to the hard mattress. I twist my head to the side, catching a glimpse of an IV sticking out of my hand. I try to raise my head from the pillow, but it feels as if it’s being anchored by a cement block and my neck can’t support the weight.
“Sweetheart, don’t. Just stay still, okay?” Mama whispers in a tearful voice. “Franco, she’s awake!”
“Your job is to find the people who did this. Don’t come back to me without names!” Papa’s commanding voice barks at someone nearby before he walks over to me, stroking the side of my face.
I look up at him. “What’s going on?” I whisper. “Where am I?”
“You don’t remember anything?” Mama asks.
I shake my head, narrowing my eyes at the men in dark suits huddled in the corner of the room.
“Please tell me,” I whisper, my eyes pooling with tears. “The last thing I remember is trying to help a girl in the coat closet.”
Mama and Papa exchange a look. “You were drugged, Serena,” he says, and I can hear the pain it causes him to speak the words. “Taken.”
“I don’t understand. Taken by whom?”
“We’re going to find out,” Papa says in a terse voice. “But the important thing is that you’re here with us now because someone called in an anonymous tip about the event. Someone knew what was happening and tried to stop it. Whoever it was saved you and the others.”
Mama smooths my hair back, and moments later my eyes start to drift closed again. My parents move away from the bed, still close enough for me to hear the panic in my mother’s voice.
“Do you think it was him, Franco? There’s so much bad blood. It has to have been him! How are we going to protect her now that he knows where she is?”
I struggle to raise my head, to make sense of everything I hear in my drug-induced fog before I fall prey to sleep once again.
I part my dry lips, sweeping my tongue over them, but since my mouth is still as dry as the Mojave, it does nothing. And what’s worse is that it refuses to utter the two questions I’m desperate to ask.
Who the hell is him?
And why did he take me?
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