Kidnapped By Johnnie and Jake

Hanging by a Thread

I woke up hours later, and when I did, it was dark, the middle of the night. I was still in the same bed I'd last woken up in, and when I turned to look around me, I felt a sharp pain in my neck, which was bandaged up, and yelled.

Beside me, Johnnie awoke, and sat up. His hair was long and flat, but messy from sleeping, around his face, and most of his eyeliner and eyeshadow had smudged off, but some still remained around his eyes.

"Don't turn around," he said quietly. "Your skin is healing, you don't want to split it apart again."

"What?" I said, and it hurt a little to speak. "I have to move—I can't just sit here until it heals up."

"You have to."

"I can't," I squeaked.

"Go back to sleep. We'll talk about it in the morning."

Johnnie led back down to go back to sleep, and placed his arm over me casually.

But, it was impossible for me to do the same. My mind was racing.

This was hell.

Not only was I stuck living with a murderer, and my own abuser, but I was basically paralysed, too, at this point. If I wasn't even allowed to so much as move my head in case it disrupted the healing process of the wounds inflicted by Johnnie himself, then how on Earth was I supposed to even get up out of bed?

All I wanted was comfort. My heart ached to think about my life just a week prior. I was back at home. I fell to sleep at night without fear. I had the world in front of me. People around me who cared for me.

Now, my life had been turned inside out. Peppa was gone. I was being forced to wake up every day and face my worst fear: Johnnie Guilbert. And, if that wasn't enough, Jake Webber, too. There was never going to be a moment where I felt comfort again, because I was stuck with them. I'd never get a break.

The truth was, I was traumatised. Every time I pictured that car ride on the journey here, I felt sick to my stomach. Was there more I could've done to make an attempt at escaping? Did I let this happen to myself? Surely not. When we'd tried to escape, Peppa had been killed for it, and when I'd tried to escape for a second time in the hospital, I'd been choked. I'd even managed to get as far as being escorted away with an armed police officer, and that had still failed. There was no getting away from Johnnie; he'd always find a way.

*

I'd somehow managed to cry myself to sleep, and I woke up the next day when Johnnie got out of bed.

I knew I couldn't move my head, so I called out to him. "Johnnie."

"Yes?" he said, and I could hear him pulling some clothes on.

"Come here, I can't see you," I said softly.

He walked around to my side of the bed and sat in my eye-line.

"Please take me to a hospital. They could give me proper treatment."

"There isn't much more they could do. You'd still have to wait for your wounds to heal, just in a hospital bed instead."

"I'd rather that," I said.

"I wouldn't—not after your last trip."

"Please...just put me out with your anaesthetic, then. I can't go on like this. Even one night was enough."

Johnnie looked at me for a few moments, contemplating. I tried to give him a sad and exhausted expression to make him empathise with me. It wasn't hard to pull that face—I really was sad and exhausted.

"Just think about it today," he finally said. "We'd have to get feeding tubes for you. It would be a lot of work."

At least he was considering it, and there was a chance he was willing to do that for me. I nodded at him.

"And I'm sorry," he said, gently grabbing my hand in his. "I shouldn't have done that to you yesterday."

I nodded again, only a little as not to hurt my neck. I wasn't going to tell him it was okay, because it wasn't. "I shouldn't have tried to kill myself, either."

"No, you shouldn't," he agreed. Then, he stood up. "I need to go, now. I'll see you later."

*

Soon after Johnnie left, the bedroom door opened, and Kaycee entered the room, followed by Tara.

"Oh, Brooke," Kaycee said, walking over to me with her arms outstretched, pouting her lips. She sat close to me on the bed and wrapped her arms around my neck, hugging me. I winced with the pain. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, pulling away.

"I knew something like this would happen to you as soon as you told me you tried to escape before," said Tara, trying to lighten the mood and shrugging as she sat further down on the bed.

"I keep blaming myself for all of this," I murmured, staring blankly at the ceiling.

"No..." Kaycee said.

"Well, they did warn you," said Tara.

"Not just for being cut, I mean...for getting abducted in the first place. I should've just stayed in that taxi."

"I'm sorry," Kaycee said. "If I didn't go, you wouldn't have followed me out. I brought this onto you."

"No, it's not your fault. I made that decision," I said. "You were too drunk to see sense, but I wasn't, and I still decided to walk into the situation."

"You were trying to protect a friend," said Tara.

"And I couldn't even do that," I said.

"Stop beating yourself up about it and just accept your fate. That's what I did," said Tara.

"How long have you been here?" I asked, shuffling a bit to look at her.

"Five years now," she said. "Jake found me when I was eighteen, and I'm twenty-three now."

When Tara spoke those words, my heart completely dropped. Somehow, all this time, I had had the thought at the back of my mind that this hell would come to an end. Even though, logically, I could see no way out...I still subconsciously expected it not to last forever. Whether it would be that I'd find an escape, or that Johnnie would grow bored and forget about me, or because of something else that I hadn't thought of yet. But, hearing that Tara had been stuck with them for FIVE YEARS and was still in the same position...made every ounce of hope I'd had up until then disappear.