Page 47 of Swerve
“You must eat,” he says, his strong voice startling her in the silence. She looks at him and shakes her head.
“Why should you make this much more difficult for you?”
I study him, noticing the line of frustration between his eyes. “You should have picked a pansy,” she says.
“What is this pansy?”
“Someone who would give you what you want without a fight.”
His eyes light up with amusement. “One of you has.”
Rage erupts inside her, and something screams for her to launch herself at him, claw his face into ribbons of blood. “I hate you.”
He shrugs. “That is not problem. Is problem that you not eat. I will arrange for visit from doctor.” He walks toward her, pulling a syringe from his back pocket. “First to prepare you for that visit though.”
“What are you doing?” she screams, hating the fear propelling the question out of her.
He stands above her, the obvious awareness of his own power making her hate him even more. He jabs the needle in her thigh before she can raise a hand to stop him.
“You will sleep,” he says. “When you wake, the good doctor will have filled you with many good nutrients.”
“No,” she says, her eyes growing heavy and her throat barely able to force the word out.
“It is much better to cooperate. You will learn this as you go along. Because eventually, the outcome can only be one. You will do what we ask you to do. Or we will get rid of you. You are much too young and beautiful to die. Surely, you agree with this?”
She tries to raise an arm to push him away, but her body will not respond. She understands in a way she never has before the desire to kill another human being. She would kill him if she could. But she can’t. She can’t. Her eyes slide closed, and he disappears.
~
SHE COMES TO in a snap, her eyes slamming open, the bright light above her blinding.
The light had gone out on the tail end of her screams, and she finds herself again screaming as she scrambles up, trying to remember what happened.
The man. He stabbed the needle in her leg. She feels there now, probing for the spot. She finds it, winces at the soreness, and then notices that her left arm is sore also.
She glances at the bend of her elbow, sees the telltale bruising of a needle mark. What had he done to her? She notices then that she’s no longer thirsty. What had he given her?
A key sounds in the lock. The door swings in, and the man she has come to hate again steps inside, a wide smile on his face. “Feeling much better, yes?” he asks, a smirk in his voice.
“What did you do?” she bites out.
“The good doctor gave you nourishment. If you won’t willingly eat or drink, we’ll have to do it for you until you change your mind. We kept you out long enough to give you IVs of all the things your body needs. What is it they say? The miracles of modern medicine?”
Mia stares at him, an anger rising inside her that is like nothing she has ever felt. She feels as if the flames of it will completely melt everything in its path, her will, her resistance, the very essence of who she knows herself to be. “Why are you doing this?” she asks.
He studies her for a few long moments, and then, “It is not personal, beautiful. It is business. It’s not that you and your friend did something wrong. You were simply the ones I came across that night as right for our operation. Do not waste time trying to figure out what you could have done differently. How you might have made another choice. There was no escaping it. This is your fate. Life is cruel that way.”
She squeezes her arm at the place where the needle had gone in, as if she can remove the life-sustaining nutrients he had forced on her. “So you get to decide who is a victim and who isn’t?”
“Yes,” he says. “That is my job.”
“You’re despicable.”
“Despicable?” he asks casually, as if she has called him something flattering.
“Scum of the earth.” She struggles for other words strong enough to convey what she sees in him, but she can’t find any. She spits at him, hitting him dead between the eyes.
She has never seen fury blaze to life the way it does on his face. He draws back a fist, and she closes her eyes and braces herself for the punch. But it doesn’t come. Instead, he makes a sound that almost isn’t human, both of his hands shoving her backward so that she slams into the wall and melts to the floor, the breath knocked from her lungs.
