Fateful Hindrance

23. One Day I'll Get Sick Of Saying Everything's Okay

Chapter 23

One Day I’ll Get Sick Of Saying Everything’s Okay

 

 

My stomach was rolling when I was conscious once more.  I tried to throw up, awkwardly bending to the side, but nothing came.  I whimpered as my head drooped and let out a small cry when my burned neck and shoulder pulled. 

“Emmy, darling…”

A voice all too familiar was in the room with me.  I could feel him, feel his eyes on me, and I knew he were the only one there with me.

So I opened my eyes, landing on Ed, who was cuffed to a chair just a few feet in front of me.  He looked distraught, his eyes roaming over me, finding every bruise, cut, and burn.  He wasn’t looking so good himself, his button up shirt stained with dirt and dried blood, his hair sticking up in a few places.  He looked like Ed and yet not like him at all.

“Oh, Emmy…what have they done to you?”

“Ed?  W-what are you doing here?  Why…?”

“Darling, don’t worry about me!” he said, shaking his head.  “Have they…have they burned you?”

I laughed, but it came out more like a sob.  Even breather made my ribs strain, burning me on the inside.  “If only that was the only thing they’ve done,” I whispered.  “Have they…?”

He shook his head.  “No, nothing’s been done to me.  You’re far worse than the rest of us.”

“Rest of us?”

“John and Ryan.  They’re still in the next room.  Before they’d brought me in here with you, I was there.  John told me what happened with them getting the two of you.  I was there when they got Ryan at the meeting.  He’d fought them off long enough for me to get away, but I knew they were going to get me in the end.  I’ve only been here a few hours, while you all have been here for two days.”

“Two days?”

It hadn’t seemed like that long.  Only hours.    

But then maybe that was the heroin talking.

And that thought made my stomach heave again. 

“Calm down, Emmy,” Ed soothed as best he could.  “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“No,” I whimpered, my tears falling freely since I couldn’t wipe them away.  I would have wiped them on the sleeves of John’s shirt, but they were gone – burned away when they’d set fire to it and still soaked from the bucket of ice water that had been thrown on me just after.  “It’s not going to be okay.”

“Don’t say that.  We’ll get out of here…somehow.”

I shook my head.  “No…not that.  I cracked, Ed.  I cracked and told them everything I knew.”

I couldn’t help it.  I remembered distinctly every question Connor or Braewyn would ask, I answered, giving up even more information.  I told them everything:  the map when the canvases were put together, that we were missing one more piece, that it was just going to be me and John on this assignment, just like the first time. 

The only thing I didn’t give up, only because they never asked, only assumed?

Where the canvases were, because they weren’t on the backs of the paintings still.

But after I said what I had to Ed, I realized that he had no idea what I was talking about.  I knew just by the look on his face. 

“What are you talking about?”