Page 78 of Skin Trade

She put the last image she had of him in her head. Him lying on his bed, his hands under the pillows, his face turned to her. She willed him to open his eyes, willed him to look at her as if she were standing right in front of him. She could make him so vivid in her mind. “Please, Seth. Please hear me.”

“Please. Please Seth.” She rocked as she said his name. Said it so many times it started to become a mantra. “Seth. Please. Hear me.” Over and over until her head hurt with it and she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Seth. Please,” she sobbed and blew out an exhausted breath, she was crying. Not through sadness or pity, but the frustration of the one man who’d saved her, who’d taken her in and done nothing but play with her pride, she’d walked out on him and now she couldn’t reach him. “Please hear. Me. Please, please, please.”

It would be her own fault if he didn’t come looking for her. He knew she wanted to find her father; he would figure where she was. He had after all seen the papers on her dressing table, but the biggest question to it all, was would he come?

Based on the sky outside, it wouldn’t be long before he was awake. The sun was starting its decent for the night. Very soon, all those who were part of the undead world would wake from their unnatural sleeps. Seth would wake alone, but how long before he went looking for her?

The week she hadn’t seen him, he’d been working, busy. She’d checked many times for him, but he hadn’t been in his room, didn’t look like he’d come back at all. When she’d asked Sky, Sky had told her it was business. What if he did this?

What if the way she’d walked away from him in the kitchen meant he was done with her?

That thought made her heart ache more than the idea of being locked in this place. But was she too late now?

She didn’t bother getting up to go over to the window. Just crawled along the hard floor until it turned to carpet where the floor had been covered around the desk. Making it comfier she supposed for someone to work longer. Not that this was an office. But what if it had been? What if once, this was someone’s office? There would be power in here somewhere.

Stopping beside the desk, just shy of the window, she paused. The carpet didn’t go the whole way around and it was held down by carpet rails at the edges. They were flush with the floor, though. She tried picking at them, even getting her nail under so she could start on it and get part of the carpet up, but they’d stuck it down with the intent no one would get it out again.

She had her water bottle. It was mostly empty now. One she had taken from the fridge and drunk despite being afraid that they’d poisoned it somehow. But now, she poured the last of the water into her mouth, put the neck of the plastic bottle under her foot and pressed down to make it flat. She just needed enough of a gap under the carpet rail to get hold of it and pull the damn thing back. The water bottle could do that.

The neck of it crushed after two stomps on it and she wedged the hard plastic under the edge. The problem was the bottle was soft, and when she tried to use it to manoeuvre the bottle up and unstick the rail, all she managed to do was bend the bottle.

The bathroom.

Scrambling to her feet, she almost lost her balance. It was dark in there. No windows and no working lights, but it didn’t matter. The toilet roll and its holder were easy enough to locate. She snapped them off the wall, pulled the toilet roll holder’s middle out and ran back to her bottle. It worked by sticking that inside her bottle, pushing it down as far as she could towards the neck, but leaving enough that it was stuck under the rail.

Leaning back against the glass window, she brought her knee up and then slammed her foot against the bottle, trying to shove it under the edge. It moved a little, wedging itself under there and leaving enough of a gap between the floor and rail that Payton could almost get her finger under it. She kicked again, kicked once more. The third time got the bottle in enough that the tip of the roll holder pushed at the gap she’d made. One more swift kick … it was in.

“Yes.”

Enough room to get her fingers in so she could peel back the carpet. All she needed were wires and a loose floorboard, something that she could wire the computer to and try and get in contact with anyone.

She got the carpet as far as the desk and then swore at herself. Of course, she needed to move that. What had she been thinking? She wasn’t afraid it would make any noise. Hell, she’d made enough noise already and no one had come to that, so they sure as hell weren’t going to hear her dragging a desk along the floor, no matter how big and heavy it was. And this thing was cumbersome.

Several minutes later and a whole lot of huffing and puffing, she managed to get the desk all the way off the carpet. It probably didn’t need to be moved that far, but she wasn’t giving it the chance that she’d need to move it more.

Now, with the carpet rolled back about a foot, she stood on it close to where the desk had been and pulled it back, gripping the carpet in her hand. All around her the carpet was stuck fast and two times she slipped, creating burns along the inside of her fingers. It didn’t distract her, though. If there was anything under the carpet, she needed to get to it. And what she had seen so far showed that the floor was very different. Still with wooden boards.

She pulled it another three feet before it was back enough, and the tiniest speck of white came into view. The corner of a box or something. “Come on, you arsehole,” she said as she yanked at the carpet, her arms tired, her back ached. This thing had been glued down. It had to have been with the effort it took just to get another foot off the ground. But it was worth it.

When she stopped she had uncovered the white box. It wasn’t a power supply like she’d hoped, it wasn’t even loose wires. No. It was better than that. It was the socket for a phone. However, she’d smashed the phone in one of her many attempts to get someone to answer the door. One hit too many.

Didn’t matter, though. She still gripped it with hope, plugged the damn thing in. There was no dial tone, but she wasn’t surprised with that. The snapped handset meant one of the wires were broken. She didn’t know how she knew, but somehow, she put the wires together, stripped back part of the wire casing to expose the line beneath and then twisted them together.

Dial tone. Not loud. It crackled in places, but she didn’t care about that. She grabbed the card from her back pocket and punched in Zane’s number.

“Zane Harman,” he said into the phone. But it sounded like his head was in a bucket, or he was somewhere far away.

“Zane? Zane it’s Payton.”

“Hello? Is anyone there?” Mick was in the background. Zane said, “No one there.” Then hung up.

“No, no. no …” She tried again, hitting redial on the phone. “Come on.”

This time she didn’t give time for Zane to say his name. “Zane. It’s Payton. Please.” She shouted her words into the microphone of the phone.

“There’s someone there. Hello? I can’t hear you.”

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