chapter 31: click

It was with the girl in her arms that Willow slept the most comfortably.

After their intense love-making session, their bodies both incredibly exhausted, they fell asleep in a spooning position—with Willow as the big spoon, of course. Squeezing the girl protectively, she fell into the deepest sleep she had fallen into in a long time.

As her eyes cracked open the next morning, she nearly forgot where she was. As she looked around the room through her squinted eyes, the morning light pouring in through the window, she noticed the blinds were pulled all the way up. She suddenly remembered the previous night and how she had lifted the blinds to watch the fireworks.

She then shifted her head to the space on the bed beside her, expecting to find her firework-watching companion lying next to her, but she was met with an empty bed.

Scrunching her eyebrows, she sat up and pulled the sheets over her cold and completely naked body. She looked around the floor and saw that both her and the girl's clothes were scattered all around. She assumed August must have slipped downstairs before she had woken up. She suddenly felt embarrassed, hoping Ronnie hadn't woken and seen her yet, because she knew Ronnie would never be able to let down the fact that she slept with August in his guest bedroom.

She quickly shot out of bed, gathering her clothes from the night before off the floor and pulling them on. But then she realized that August's clothes were still on the floor. Certainly she didn't go downstairs...naked?

Willow's eyebrows threading in confusion, she quickly ran out of the door and downstairs, her boots loudly thumping down the staircase. She was sure that if Ronnie wasn't awake by then that he would have been woken soon from her loud steps. As she arrived downstairs, she noticed the house was still messy from the party the night before. Red solo cups were everywhere, and there was even weed and cocaine sitting around on the tables. She was shocked that Ronnie hadn't already cleaned everything up, as he usually didn't just let messes go uncleaned.

"August?" she called out, only being met with the sound of an empty house. Her heart picked up speed as she began to worry. Something felt wrong, so wrong.

"August?!" she called out louder, peeking her head down the hall and then making her way into the kitchen.

Her blood ran cold at the sight in front of her. Ronnie lay there on the kitchen floor, unconscious and with an open gash on his head.

"Ronnie!" Willow exclaimed, rushing over to her friend, kneeling down and taking his face into her hands. She assessed the wound on his head, noticing that he had lost a lot of blood. Fear coursed through her veins like electric shock.

"Ronnie!" she exclaimed, shaking his face back and forth. "Please wake up," she pleaded, her breathing becoming shaky and heavy. She patted his face frantically with her hands, desperate that he would just open his eyes so she would know he was at least alive.

"Ronnie, wake the fuck up!" she yelled, feeling tears form in her eyes as her friend did not move. She began to slap his face harder, wincing at having to do so but she needed to jolt him awake. "Ronnie, please," she whispered, still shaking and slapping his face.

His dark eyelids slowly fluttered open and a weak grunt escaped his throat.

"Oh God," Willow breathed, closing her eyes as relief washed over her, although her heart was still pounding. Her hands were even shaking from the fear. She thought she had stumbled upon her dead best friend.

"Will," he mumbled, his eyebrows scrunching in confusion as he half-opened his eyes and looked up at the woman whose dark hair fell across her face.

"Ronnie, what happened?" Willow asked, taking his hands and slowly pulling him to sit up, placing her hand on his shoulder to steady him as he looked like he was about to fall over.

He scrunched his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. He suddenly hissed as he realized the pain on his forehead, gently reaching up and placing his shaky fingers on the wound, wincing from the pain and bringing his fingers up to his eyes. "It's still wet," he mumbled, staring dazedly at the crimson blood shining on his fingertips. The wound was still fresh, he noted.

"Ronnie, what the hell happened?" Willow inquired, growing antsy to know who would have knocked her best friend out like this. And more importantly, where was her lover?

He gulped, his eyes fluttering closed as the dull headache got the best of him. He reopened his eyes, slowly looking upwards to meet Willow's expectant gaze. He slowly spoke, "R-Rick."

Willow's eyes widened as soon as the name rolled off his tongue, and it scared Ronnie to see genuine horror in Willow's eyes. "Rick?" she quickly snapped. "What? What did he do?"

Ronnie slightly shook his head, trying to remember what exactly happened. "I-I woke up on the couch early this morning. I had passed out on it last night, and I woke up because I heard something in the kitchen." He squeezed his eyes shut, sighing as he tried to push through the grogginess in his head. "I came in here, and there he was, rummaging through the alcohol." He looked up at the island next to him that still held some full and some empty bottles of liquor. "I yelled at him, but next thing I knew he smashed a bottle to my head."

Willow looked to her left, just now noticing the shards of glass and broken bottom of a liquor bottle scattering the tile floor around them. Her heart began to pound in anger that Rick hurt Ronnie, but it also began to pound in fear of August.

"She's gone," she mumbled, standing up and beginning to pace the kitchen.

"Who?" Ronnie confusedly asked, using the bar chair to help himself up since his friend was busy panicking around his kitchen.

"August," she snapped, stopping and resting her palms on the island counter. She looked at Ronnie with frenzied eyes. "She's gone."

Ronnie's eyes widened, knowing exactly what that meant.

Willow breathed hard, looking at the countertop as if it would give her answers on how to reverse time and wake herself up before Rick broke into Ronnie's house, knocked Ronnie out, and kidnapped August.

"He took her..." she mumbled, a million thoughts and possibilities running through her mind that she most definitely did not want to be going through her head. Her lips began to shake and curl in anger as all she could see was red.

"Willow..." Ronnie began, concern coating his features. "What's on your neck?" He raised his hand to point at a dot on the side of her neck that was red with irritation.

She brought her cold fingers to her neck that was fire to the touch from all her anger, feeling a small wound and wincing.

"It looks like a mark from a tranquilizer," Ronnie quietly told her, the thought of his leader getting stabbed in the neck and sedated making him shudder. He couldn't imagine Willow involuntarily unconscious. "That must have been how he took her without you waking up."

Took her. Those words resounded in the woman's brain like a broken record, each syllable taunting her that her sworn enemy had plucked from her garden her most beloved and prized fruit. "That bastard!" she screamed between gritted teeth, slamming her hand down so hard on the counter that she heard a crack come from the marble surface and noticed a jump from Ronnie. "I'm gonna kill him," she mumbled lowly, grabbing her keys from the key bucket that had been filled with partygoers' keys from the night before. She floated towards the door, fists balled, murder written all across her face.

Right as she grabbed the handle and swung the door open, Ronnie stopped her. "Willow, wait!"

She froze, turning to stare at him with her heaving chest and scary eyes. Even Ronnie, her best friend in the whole world, was scared of Willow with the way she looked at that moment. "There's not much time to waste, Ronnie!" she yelled, thinking about how Rick could have been doing anything with August as they spoke. He could have been harming her, raping her, killing her... She grew sick with fury at the thought.

"You know it's not smart to just go to Rick's territory all alone! You will be outnumbered, and you will get killed!" he exclaimed, wincing as his volume worsened his headache.

Willow stared at him with cold eyes. "Then tell the gang to unite. Tell them to get their asses to Rick's territory as fast as possible." She glanced at his wounded head. "Call them first, then clean yourself up. But I have to go now, Ronnie. There's no way I can waste time waiting when the person I love most could be killed at any moment."

Her voice wavered with her last words, and she was gone in a flash as Ronnie's front door slammed shut.

♠

She had felt something sharp stab her in her thigh. By the time her eyes snapped open, she could barely see, and the world was seemingly going dark around her. The entire room spun, and she felt like she was spinning around right with it. The only thing she saw was the blurry outline of a figure standing over her bed as her eyes closed and she fell asleep before she could register her own panic. The last thing she felt was being torn from Willow's warm, safe arms and placed in the arms of a cold stranger—being placed in the hands of danger and unfamiliarity.

Now she was finally coming to after having fell into the deep sleep for an amount of time that she did not have the mental energy to calculate. Even if she did, she had no resources to do so. As her eyelashes fluttered open, she ignored the stiffness of her neck as she tilted it upwards, waiting for her vision to focus. As it did, she looked with wide eyes around her.

She was sitting in a quite uncomfortable chair, with her hands tied behind her back, her legs tied to the chair legs, and a rope tied around her middle to ensure she could barely squirm in the cold metal chair. Her surroundings were dark to the point that the harder she stared into the darkness in hopes of making out something, whether it be a darker shadow or sliver of light, the darker the room seemed to get. It was cold, goosebumps rising on her skin even under the unfamiliar fabric she was dressed in. She looked down but couldn't see what clothes she was wearing; all she knew was that they didn't feel like hers.

Her breath began to quicken as reality set in. She leaned forward, pulling against the rope and panicking at its tightness. She yanked her arms and legs, trying to find a loose point somewhere; but it was to no avail. She was only left with formulating rope burns on her wrists and ankles.

She wanted to groan out, to let her threatening tears spill, to call out for help. But her shaky breaths slowed, and she thought it not the best idea to draw attention to herself as she suddenly felt not alone at all.

A nervous gulp was followed by two teeth biting her lower lip, her nostrils flaring as she slowly pulled air in and out through them in an attempt to calm the accumulating anxiety in her chest. The rabbit, seemingly still in his state of sedation, had apparently woken up, and her chest reverberated the sounds of his quickly thumping foot.

"Kidnapping a girl is quite taxing."

A sharp gasp drew from August's lips as she jumped in her chair as much as she could while being tied so tightly. Every muscle in her body tensed, and she began to shake with fear at the deep voice that spoke from somewhere in the same room she was. It sounded close, but not too close.

"I honestly must praise the woman for executing such a task so swiftly," the voice continued but this time it was in a different direction, seemingly on the opposite side of the room.

August snapped her head in the direction of the voice. "Who are you?!" she screamed, her cracking voice echoing in the pitch-black room that now seemed very large.

Click. Her eyes suddenly filled with light, blinded by the shock of it, and she squeezed them shut with a hiss. Blinking rapidly, she slowly reopened her eyes hesitantly, not at all prepared to see who stood over her, merely inches away from the chair she sat.

"The name's Rick, doll," the man's deep voice glided across the air as she took in his appearance. He looked about in his forties, his slicked-back black hair reflecting the light of the single lightbulb hanging over her, its chain swinging back and forth right above his head from having just been turned on. His dark eyes were cold, and she thought to herself that she wouldn't have been able to differentiate between his eyes and those of a lifeless dummy. His crooked smile sent a shiver down her spine, his grin too large to be genuine through his scruffy beard that was in the process of turning grey.

"Rick..." she mumbled in confusion, the name seeming so familiar.

Then it hit her.

Willow had told her, so long ago when they had just arrived at the hideout in Utah, that the Blue Porcelain gang had a rival gang there in New York. And the name of the leader the woman had told the young girl about? The leader who was out to murder Willow and her gang and was the whole reason the girl had been kidnapped and taken to Utah in the first place? The leader who stood clad in black leather with fingerless gloves gripping a rather sharp knife that reflected light right into her pupils?

Rick.

Her lower lip began to quiver, her deep blue eyes staring up at him and silently begging him to not use the knife for whatever his malicious intents were.

"And you are the infamous August!" he exclaimed theatrically, throwing his hands out in the air and taking a step back before bowing down so that his upper body was parallel to the floor.

August looked down at herself, seeing that she was wearing a scratchy white robe with nothing underneath, as she had slept nakedly with Willow after their night of making up to each other.

Willow.

"Where's Willow?!" August desperately blurted out, worried about what Rick might have done to her when he took August. She knew that Willow would have woken up, with how much of a light sleeper she was. There was no way she would've stayed asleep while they took August from her arms.

Rick raised his head, slowly straightening his body back to a standing position as his eerie grin stayed spread across his cheeks. "Well, nice to meet you, too. Pleased to make your acquaintance? Happy to finally be in your graceful presence?"

"Where the fuck is she?" August repeated, her voice lowering. She stared at the man with threaded eyebrows, a look of threatening defiance on her face.

It was as if he found the facade the girl was putting on amusing. August hated the way that he cackled after a moment, as if even through her tough front he could hear the rabbit pounding his paw against her chest as if willing to die to break out of his confinements.

"Such a brave one!" he exclaimed. "No wonder Willow liked you. I must say..." He took a step forward until he was merely inches in front of the girl, crouching down until he had to look up to see her. Placing his elbows on his knees, he spoke in a quiet voice and stared at the girl's eyes that did not break their fierce stare. "Your rebellion is making me quite hard."

Her face twisted slightly, a nauseous feeling rising in her stomach as she stared into his empty eyes that bore into hers, his crooked smile representing his horrible thoughts.

"You're disgusting," she muttered, clenching her jaw as she tried to swallow down the sick feeling in her gut. All she wanted to know was if Willow was okay.

"I'm dying to know, August," Rick spoke with vileness lacing his normal tone. "Did you let Willow spread your legs and bust that pussy of yours? Or did the woman tie you down like I have you tied down right now?" His chilling words sent goosebumps on her skin, and he noticed, his grin widening as he looked down at the girl's exposed thigh. He placed his hand on it, ignoring the frightened whimper from the girl as he slid his hand up under her robe to a dangerous extent. "Because that would aid me in knowing if these ropes should stay on you during the next few minutes."