Vengeance (Burning Beliefs #2)

Chapter Ten *edited*

SERENA'S POV

"I said I'm not going!" I scream past the blood pouring out of my lips.

When I was younger, I used to death-grip the chains of the swings at the school playground during recess. My hands would smell like rusted metal, and that's exactly how this tastes.

Involuntary tears stream down my face, paving streams through the cracked, dried russet staining my skin. The man in front of me nods to the man behind me, and the assistant takes the iron and jams it further into the muscle of my back. A copper wire is attached to the back of it, with extension cords trailing to the back of the room where a switch is plugged into the wall. The assitant, the man wearing shining black shoes and a black-as-the-plague suit, flips the switch.

Currents of blue pour into my body, and it feels like I'm being consumed by a thousand suns. It enters my eyes and I'm blinded with a dazzling, exhilirating, and dangerous white light. I choke and cough on the blood oozing like toxic waste out of my lungs, trying to scream through the blockage. I get a pathetic, gurgling half-whimper instead.

And he doesn't stop. The pain still courses through me, a million lightning bolts crammed into my tiny shell of a body, every second a pinpoint knife stabbed into my soul.

He turns it off.

My legs have fallen asleep; I'm sitting on my knees. My wrists are handcuffed to chains bolted to the ground, dark crimson bloodstains glimmering in the light.

I crumble to the ground, as much as I can. The whole world is tipping back and forth and back and forth, like a moment of dizziness I can't escape. It's deadly silent, the echoes of my screams slowly fading to the back of the building. It's plain gray, cement floors, with walls so tall I can't see the ceiling, and single-bulb lights placed at random in the corners.

I stare at the ground. I'm dying. I can feel it ebbing away inside of me, the hysteria replacing my blood like a drug. Black static lines the corners of my eyes, closing in on me with a hushed whispering beating against my eardrums.

Two shiny leather shoes walk up to me, confidently. He knows he did his job, and that he did it well. I raise my head slowly, scanning the man who stands over my weak, dying, soulless, corrupted frame.

Ebony cotton pants. A ruffled white shirt. A silk black jacket, a red rose hanging out of one pocket. He looks like he's dressed for his own wedding.

And then his eyes. Metallic blue, cold steel, flashing dark behind the menace. And his hair, swept back, colored like autumn leaves. It's the face I should've been dreaming about.

He smirks at me, Zach's demeaning, pointed eyes glaring down at me like he's squashed a bug.

I don't have the strength to cry. He won. He broke every single piece of me.

Blackness.

*   *   *

The light.

Morning sunshine pours into my eyes suddenly and swiftly. Every piece of me was enveloped in the darkness, slowly swallowed by ebony velvet cruelty. Now it's like I've been lifted into the heavens.

"Have a nice sleep, sweetheart?"

"What the hell did you do to me, you son of a bitch?" I kick out of the covers and back up to the point where I'm parallel to the wall.

"What do you mean?" he looks confused, and this time, I don't think he's acting.

My stomach starts rolling like a washing machine, but I push it down.

"Those images you just implanted into my mind?" I scowl.

His lips twitch upwards in a nightmarish smile. "You can't always blame me for your demons, Serena. Tell me, what did these 'images' look like?"