Page 79 of Skin Trade

“I need help,” she yelled. “Please.”

“Hey, Mick, can you tell what this is. ‘Ere.”

“Help Payton,” she said. “Help me.”

“Help me?” There was muffling. “I can’t tell what they’re saying.”

Louder. “Help me. Its Payton.”

“Payton?”

“Yes. Oh God. Yes. “It’s Payton. Please I need--” The line cut off. “What? No. No.” She hammered the button on the phone, hit redial. “Zane? Zane are you there?” Nothing. She put the receiver to her ear, holding the two pieces together. No dial tone now. She unplugged it from the floor, plugged it back in. “Oh, God. Come on.” Nothing. “Zane, please …”

She tried several times. Even pulled the wire apart in the receiver to try and get a better connection, but nothing. The line was dead. Someone had cut it. They had to have.

She screamed, launched the phone. It hit the glass window and bounced back into pieces. The receiver snapped where she had broken it before, but this time, it came clean in two pieces that went different ways across the floor. She didn’t care. She hadn’t lost the call because of anything she’d done. No. Someone had cut the line, cut off her communication, and that meant one thing. They were watching her, or at the very least, knew what she was doing.

“Fuck you,” she said to the ceiling, assuming they had to have cameras up there or something to monitor. They’d not shoved her in this room and then not watch her. They wouldn’t.

The office chair was one of those big heavy leather things. But right then, with her anger and fear mixing into adrenaline through her body, she probably could have lifted twice the usual weight. She grabbed the chair by its back, lifted it and swung the swivel feet towards the window. It bounced off with enough power that Payton’s entire body shook with the reverberation from it. It didn’t stop her. She picked it up again, aimed it and swung once more. Just the same.

The glass shook in its frame, bending to accommodate the hit and then snapping back into place. “Smash, you bastard. Fucking smash.” She tried again, lifted the chair despite the way it made her arms ache from holding it, but she brought it back, thrusting it into the glass with as much power as she could manage.

When it didn’t work, not even a chip in the window, she set the chair on its rollers and pushed it with a scream. Pushing it into the now empty bookcase.

“Why don’t you come in here and tell me what you want? You must want something.”

There were no cameras she could see, nothing that said anyone could listen, but she was damn sure they had to have a way. In the centre of the room, she spun as she spoke. “Answer me. Tell me what you want.”

It had got dark now. The day had passed in bouts of anger and frenzied attacks on the room as she tried the door, anything, and then moments of silence as she’d given up, sat on the floor and gathered her strength again, but this … the cutting of the phone was the first bit of contact she’d had with any of them. The first acknowledgment that they knew what she was doing.

The room was dark itself. No lights came on when the sun went down. Not that it was all the way gone, but enough now the vampires would be rising. She hoped the fucking thirsty got in here the way they had at Seth’s place to eat their way through. She wished anything that would get her out of this room.

“My father isn’t here? Is he?” she said up to the ceiling. “It’s all a lie?”

She paced the room. It was about the only thing to keep her calm. Sitting on the floor wasn’t helping now. Every time she sat, her mind went over everything, every possible way she could break out of the room. Hell, she even tried to jam the broken phone into the gaps at the door like she had with the bottle and the carpet, but that thing was locked and there was no way she was getting out.

Another hour, more darkness. Lights below her, as the world moving about their business without the knowledge she was trapt up here. She was so high too; she had no chance of attracting the attention of anyone in an office opposite. There was no one.

“Open the fucking door,” she shouted again. “Just open it and tell me what you want.”

She almost didn’t believe it when the lock clicked on the door. She was where the desk was, screaming up at the ceiling when it happened. It made her pause, hold her breath. The door opened slowly. She readied herself as a man stepped into the room. Her head pounding. She was tired, but she would fight.

She gasped. “Seth?”

“Hello, Payton,” he said.

Voice calmer now. “Oh, God. Seth.” She launched herself into a run towards him, crashed into the solidness of his body. “You came.”

His arms wrapped around her, put a protective barrier against her and the world. “You called me,” he said. “In my head.”

She wrapped her arms so tightly around him that she could feel her own heart beating against him.

“Wait,” she said, frowning. His grip on her loosened and she blinked up at him. “You unlocked the door.” She went to step back.

A coldness came across his face.

“Seth, what’s going on?”

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