Played by the Mafia

Chapter 9. The Highest Room in the Tallest Tower (BRYN)

Waking up screaming is bad. It's worse, when your nightmare continues after you wake up. Or when you desperately wish to dive right back into the nightmare, because it's not real.

Unfortunately, this is the case here.

The only way I know I'm awake is because my throat hurts, and in my dreams I never feel pain. The pounding in my head is so bad, it floods my field of vision with floating lights. Those little buggers overpower the green-gray dimness that surrounds me. The harder I try to see where the hell I am, the more the lights flash, jolting my temples with each discharge. I can't do it anymore...

With a groan, I close my eyes and lay my cheek on the floor... stone. Now, my whole body is curled up on the rough-cut stone. The aches multiply along its length, particularly in my low back and hips. They are dull, nagging, but it's the migraine and the parched mouth that are killing me. I wish they take me over the threshold of endurance already, and I pass out.

Instead, angst-filled thoughts bounce around my splitting head to anchor me in my sorry reality.

I was such a fool to fall into Irene's trap. A moron. A complete fucking idiot, floating on a wedding cloud.

Anyone with an ounce of gray matter would have turned the car around in my position. When they first spotted that poor animal, or, at the latest, when they heard Nina giggle. I ascribed her creepy little giggles to the teenage awkwardness, not malice. I didn't suspect foul play, Because my head was full of dreams and cotton candy.

When I remember how I gushed about the manor to Matteo, tears squirt onto my cheek. O, Matteo, Matteo, I'm so sorry!

I'd give my only eye to tell him in person how sorry I'm for being so easily taken. Alas, it's never that easy.

On the fourth try, I sit up and take stock of my prison, because I have zero doubts I am imprisoned. But as far as prisons go, this one is weird as fuck.

That gray-green glow? That's sunlight filtering through vegetation, because I am in a cave opening on a waterfall. Yes, a waterfall, split into two long tongues of water, with rainbows curving over it, plunging past me into a bottomless ravine.

Or at least I can't see the bottom, only a green mass far, far down below, when I crawl to the edge. And I have to crawl, because water vapor saturates both air and stone, making the stone slick. The floor... I swear it's sloping ever so slightly toward the abyss.

If I slip, the fall would be fatal.

Not yet, though, bitches. Not yet!

I stubbornly hang at the precipice, because some of that abundant water drips on my side as well and my jailers left me a chipped bowl. Gripping the bare rocks with my toes and fingers, looking away from the spectacular view to avoid getting dizzy, I extend the bowl under the drip. The flow is as strong as from a faucet turned all the way up, so it nearly rips the bowl out of my fingers.

I cry out and retreat from the ledge, drop my butt on the stone, and sit, clutching the precious vessel to my chest. For a second, there's nothing but the rush of blood in my ears. Then slowly, stubbornly, I fixate on how much my dry throat craves this water and how much I want to see Matteo again.

All I have to do is to kneel at the edge, let go of the stone, hold the bowl in both hands tightly and look. My teeth switch from rattling to clenching. I'm a trained climber, I don't get vertigo.

I grew up so coddled; I used to seek thrills of petty lawbreaking in the name of adventure... of course this was before I met Matteo and gazed into the eyes of killers for whom my life wasn't worth a penny. Because of Matteo, yes. But Matteo is my thrill, my air and my everything.