My heart began to thump unevenly as panic clawed its way into my chest. Calm down, Charlotte, I told myself. The power is just out. It’s not as if that has never happened before.
Yet something felt off.
Something wasn’t right.
Pulling back the covers, I swung my legs over the side of the mattress and stood. Creeping toward the window, I reached for the blinds, meaning to look outside to see how far the power outage reached tonight.
An ear-piercing sound split through the stillness and I shrieked and stumbled backward. My heel caught on the too-long hem of my silk bottoms and I landed on the bed. I lay there feeling my heart pound against my ribs as the fire alarms inside the building shrieked with urgency.
Was there a fire?
Out in the hall of the building, I could hear doors opening and closing, the murmur of voices as people made their way toward the exits.
Great. I guess it wasn’t just a false alarm. With a sigh, I pushed up off the bed and grabbed a super soft mohair sweater and slipped my arms through, wrapping it around my middle.
Yeah, technically the fire alarms meant to hurry, but I was in no rush to get outside in the middle of the night, on the sidewalk in the cold. No, thank you.
Navigating the pitch-black apartment shouldn’t be a problem; the furniture was always in the exact same spot. I stepped out the bedroom door and walked a few steps down the tiny hallway and into the rest of the apartment.
Where I collided with something hard and large.
What the hell?
I knew for a fact that my furniture was not in this spot.
A large, hot palm wrapped around my upper arm, hooking on like a vise, and jerked me forward. “If you scream, I’ll kill you.”
I screamed anyway.
I opened my mouth and let out a startled yell as my entire body jerked away from the voice. This was not furniture. This was not good.
His other hand covered my mouth, muffling my scream.
“I said shut up!” he demanded in a harsh whisper, pressing his palm hard against my mouth and jaw. His hand was sweaty and sticky. I wanted to gag.
I held myself stock still, partially in shock. Was there really a fire? Or was the alarm just so thieves could burglarize this building with the distraction of an emergency?
Now I was sorry I didn’t hurry down to the sidewalk like everyone else in the building.
The man pulled his hand away from my mouth.
“If you were going to rob the building, you should have done it in the middle of the day when most everyone was at work,” I told him.
I felt his stare through the darkness. I could barely make out his features, but he was a large man, likely over six feet and outweighing me by at least fifty pounds. His face pushed in close to mine and his very garlicky breath blew in my face.
“What part of shut up did you not understand?”
My stomach tightened. Stay calm, Charlotte. I reminded myself. Staying calm in high-stress situations is what I was trained for. “My purse is on the counter and all my jewelry is in the bedroom. I’m leaving. I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”
I started to step past him on my way to the door.
I got two steps before he grabbed me.
I didn’t think it would be that easy, but at least I tried.
I was jerked off my feet and stumbled back into the solid wall of his body. I felt his breath brush against the back of my ear and little goose bumps of extreme creepiness covered my neck. He leaned close, until I could literally hear the in and out of his nasty mouth breathing.
“I’m not here for your money,” he intoned.
He could totally do voiceover for some creepy as hell B-rated movie.
“What are you here for?” I asked, proud that my voice wasn’t shaking at all.
He chuckled. It was evil and vile. A shiver started in the balls of my feet and slowly racked my entire body.
“You.”
I had two choices. I could:
A) Dissolve into a puddle of begging and tears
Or
B) Put the woman’s defense class I took to good use.
I brought my bare foot up and slammed it down on the inside of his instep. He was wearing heavy boots and my size-six foot was bare.
He laughed.
I didn’t think it was funny.
I threw out my elbow and caught him in the rib. The second I heard the wheeze of pain, I spun around and kicked him in the balls.
He made this little choking sound that I rather enjoyed, and I took off through the darkness toward the door. I wasn’t surprised to find the door wasn’t even closed. In fact, a slim ray of light showed through the crack. The generators to the building must have been on and illuminating the hallways and powering the elevators.
The fire alarm was still screaming so loudly that my ears were beginning to buzz, as I yanked open the door and plunged into the poorly lit hallway. But at least there was enough light so I could see where I was going.
By now the others had already vacated the floor and I was alone. I ran forward, down the carpeted hallway, passing by numbered apartment doors and bare white walls.
Someone tackled me from behind and I fell face first into the plaid carpeting. Both my arms were pinned behind my back and then a knee held them down. A hard yank on the back of my head brought my face up off the floor, and I looked upward into one of the emergency lights.
“Just for that, I’m going to have to have a little fun with you before I drop you off.”
Drop me off? I wasn’t a pizza that needed delivered.
I began to struggle beneath him and he yanked harder on my hair, making it scream and burn at the roots. The knee gouging into my back was suddenly gone, and I started to flip, but before I could get around he straddled me, pinning my hands back against me and sinking his crotch right up against them.
Then he swiveled his hips around. “Feel that?” he said crudely. “I’m gonna enjoy getting answers outta you.”
I’m pretty sure that was the nastiest thing I’d ever heard. “What answers?” I asked, trying to ignore the grinding hips of the garlic-breath man.
The fire alarm stopped abruptly, but my ears were still ringing. I tried to catch my breath, to come up with a smart plan, to figure a way out of whatever the hell was happening to me.
“Hey, you got her or what?” someone called from down the hall. It was another man. He had a heavy New York accent.
“I got her,” garlic breath called.
“Hurry up! Let’s go!”
The next thing I knew I was being pulled up from the floor and forced toward the stairwell. The sirens of fire trucks drew near, and I knew that help would be here very soon. I just needed to buy myself a few minutes.