The Silk Trap. A Novel in 43 Chapters
Chapter 26: Caged in Blue
“Time to look pretty, baby.”Said one of the women as she uncuffed Lara from the bed and then immediately handcuffed both her hands this time.
“Mama said to give you the special suite in the hotel. You lucky girl, mama like you. I think she wants you for herself. I’m jealous,” said the second woman as she gently stroked Lara’s knotted and dirty blonde hair with her hands. The third woman unhooked her drip and needle from her swollen wrist and, looking pained at her wound, sympathized, “You are lucky to be alive, I heard.”
Lara had started to cry again. The sympathy of the women, despite them being one of the Queen’s concubines, sounded quite genuine. They seemed to feel her hurt, pain, and anger at being kidnapped, drugged and brought to this godforsaken hellish place.
All three women were in their twenties and looked European. They all spoke heavily accented English that often broke up into what sounded like Romanian to Lara. They all wore nurse uniforms and had their faces covered in masks.
“Please help me!” Lara’s sounded loud and clear for the first time since she woke up. I have to go back to Prague. I have a friend there waiting for me. This is a mistake. I am not supposed to be here. Please help me!” Lara pleaded to the woman.
All the women kept quiet and continued to help her stand up from the bed. Lara tried to balance herself on her feet, but her muscles felt totally lifeless, and she immediately felt herself collapsing under her own weight. The women were close enough to grab her before she fell and called out to the male nurse to come and help them. He arrived within seconds with a wheelchair.
The male nurse picked up Lara and put her in the wheelchair.
Lara suddenly snapped and started to shout. “Help! Help! Someone, please help me!” She was shouting as loud as she could. When the male nurse came closer to try and put his hands on her mouth, she managed to grab it in her mouth and bit it hard as she could. Lara was livid. She wanted to fight these monsters and stooges of the Queen. The nurse let out a scream as he tried to remove his hands from Lara’s clenched jaw.
At that instant, one of the women came from behind and slapped Lara hard across her face. Lara had to let go of the hand in pain. The slap had hit her right eye, which had started to bleed from a cut on the skin. One of the women quickly strapped each of Lara’s legs to the wheelchair, and one woman put a thick duck tape across her lips. They seemed to know what they were doing, like a practiced drill on a wild animal.
The male nurse then blindfolded Lara and put a mask over her duck-taped mouth. “Well, at least the mask is blue,” he quipped.
In a few seconds, Lara had transformed from the weak, drugged woman pleading for help from her captors to an angry, belligerent person who would risk it all to be free.
The three women looked at each other and then indicated to the male nurse to go ahead. Lara looked as he approached from behind her with a syringe in hand. As Lara screamed as hard as she could from under her duck tape, he injected her with something into her arm. Within seconds Lara started to feel weak, and slowly her vision clouded, and all lights went out.
Lara was unconscious again.
Lara felt like she was drowning under a waterfall. The water kept falling over her head as she struggled to swim away from the force of the water. She felt it harder and harder to keep herself afloat. She sunk under the water and saw she was surrounded by large sharks all around her. She could feel all of them swimming in a frenzied state around her, and then suddenly, a giant shark tail fin came from nowhere and slapped her hard across her face.
Lara jolted into consciousness. In front of her was one of the three women from before bending down and slapping her face repeatedly while pouring water from a handheld shower onto her head.
Lara was lying naked in a bathtub, handcuffed in a spacious, dimly lit bathroom. Her mouth was still taped shut from before. There were many tea lights around her bathtub, and the water was perfumed with lavender bathing salts. The tiles on the wall and the floor were a vivid shade of Moroccan blue.
Lara tried to adjust to the light in the room and get her bearings of who else was in the room. The room looked luxurious. The woman who had slapped her earlier was in the room with her. Lara could see she was in some expensive hotel suite, and some others were moving around in the room outside.
Lara tried to calm herself by concentrating on her breath and the sounds in the room. In all her Jujutsu training, she knew the quickest way to center herself was to bring her attention to her breath and all sounds in the area and stop trying to offer any resistance in mind. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to stay calm as she started to observe all her senses. She knew she was in danger, but she tried to float above the fear by simply being aware.
She opened her eyes and looked around the room. It looked perfectly lit like the set of a movie. A piece of soft trans music was playing in the background.
Lara was now alone in the bathtub. Lara could see the ceiling of the bathroom was studded with small pieces of colored glass. The taps in the bathtub were gilded in gold; there was a small fountain in the far corner of the room. A golden velvet lounge chair lay in the far distance next to the fountain. There was even a little smoke drifting on the floor of the bathroom.
Lara was totally flummoxed at the honeymoon suite setting and the paradoxical nature of her state.
As Lara lay there soaking her sore, handcuffed limbs in the giant bathtub, she wondered if this was just the start of a nightmare.