Jade POV
I've gotta admit, I'm impressed. Out of all the people I know, Cat Valentine is by far the least-likely to be the heir to a mafia legacy, but yet here we are in the back of a van being driven be her family's enemies.
I couldn't tell you how long we've been in this van, but it's been long enough for Vega to fall asleep. God only knows how she's managed to do that whilst tied up in such an awkward position in the back of a constantly jolting van. I guess I'd rather her be asleep than crying, which is what she was doing before she shut her eyes, Robbie on the other hand still is crying. Beck and Andre are trying to comfort him, but their attempt is pitiful without the use of their arms of legs. "Could you at least untie my hands Cat?" Beck grumbled, trying to wiggle loose.
"I could if you want your hands to be cut off by the Reatos once they discovered you've gotten free." She said harshly, trying to focus on pushing open the lock on the back of the van. "Aha!" She announced as the lock came loose.
"Why are you even trying to do that?" Jade grumbled. "Its not like any of us can climb out or anything, especially while we're moving."
"Even if we were able to, they'd see us escape. In any well-organised kidnapping there is a car driving behind the van to see if the victims try to leave." She stated as if it were common knowledge.
"Then what's the point in opening the door?" Robbie sniffled through his tears of fear.
"If I crack it open slightly-" She emphasized what she was saying through the action of actually doing it, shuffling right against the wall to that the door wasn't noticeably open. "-I can see where we are, which would be pretty helpful in case we find a phone."
"Obviously." I rolled my eyes, pretending that I new exactly what was happening.
"So where are we?" Beck asked Cat.
"According to that road sign, we're in Nevada near Los Vegas." She replied, closing the van door again.
"Why would they take us here?" Robbie spoke up.
"I don't know..." Her voice faded as she talked, before her eyes suddenly lit up with realisation. "Because no Mafia family has territory here! This must be where their hideout is! My family's been trying to work this out for weeks and I just cracked it!"
I felt myself go numb as she talked about the lack of knowledge her family had. "If they don't know where it is... then how will be find us?"
"Phoe." Cat muttered to herself. Of course that even now we know she's a Mafia heir, she'd still use her childish vocabulary.
After about another 15 minutes, the van pulled to a halt and the engine turned off. Cat rushed over to me and re-applied my mouth gag, along with Robbie and Tori's, waking up the half-Latina in the process. I really didn't understand why she made us keep them on until the door opened and one of the men glared daggers at Cat.
"Thought you'd take off your ties Valentine?!" He yelled. "Firstly, you shot Michael, and now this? We'll teach you how to act."
"She never had ties on!" Beck defended.
"Yeah right, Pretty Boy." A second man spat at him. "Come on, all out." When we all stayed perfectly still, one of the men climbed straight into the van and grabbed Tori, roughly pulling her out of the van.
"Ugh." She moaned through the mouth cover as her body collided with the ground outside the van, still not full awake yet.
Cat climbed out next on her own, no one needed to drag her as she complied, but that didn't stop one of the men from violently grabbing her arms and snapping them behind her back. "This is what you get when you break the binds." He spat. The discomfort it's Cat's face was obvious as the man twisted her arms in a way which they should have snapped, thank God for her hyper-mobility.
Whilst Cat was being secured, the men pulled the rest of us out if the van, dragging us along the building due to our legs being tied together. Taking a leaf out of Cat's book, I decided it was better to be aware and compliant, trying to remember every detail of the place we were being kept.
When we got out of the van, we were already inside a building so I couldn't get any perspective of the outside world, however it seemed like it was a decently large place. At the end of the garage were two doors door, and we were all roughly dragged through one and down a set of rough stone stairs on the other side.
The stairs lead us down to a long dank hallway with a distinct smell of mould and cigarettes, if I had the ability to use my hands, I'd be covering my nose. The walls were barely an arms length apart, with a ceiling barely 6ft high. A wicked draft reduced the temperature to near freezing and I felt myself involuntarily shiver. Along each side of the dimly lit corridor were metal bolted doors, some with small movable slits like the ones you'd see in Solitary Confinement inside a prison.
The men pulled opened one of the doors, one by one chucking us into the room, not caring how roughly we landed. I quickly sat up to scout my new surroundings. A hollow cube of concrete, one way in, no windows. In there you could have no idea how much time had passed or even if it was night or day. It was totally disorientating by design. Given enough time a person could forget their own name in there. The isolation was total and the stimulation was near zero. Clearly they didn't want us to go totally insane, as there was a small bulb hanging loosely from the ceiling, in theory it could be smashed and used as a weapon, but that would come at the risk of loosing the only thing allowing us to see so no one would be dumb enough to jeopardize that. In the corner was a metal toilet and sink along with a few rolls of paper, similar to one found in an old prison cell, no privacy but that really didn't matter. Across the room from it was a bed, well more like a plank of wood on legs, there was no mattress, no cushioning and only one thin blanket.
"We'll leave you to get your binds off." One of the men chuckled, slamming shut the metal door and quickly locking it, leaving us trapped inside.
"Cat, you can do it now right?" Beck spoke up, looking around the room for the small girl. "Cat?"
"Where is she?!" Andre spoke up.
I looked frantically around the room for the red-head, trying to call out for her also, despite my mouth gag. Whilst I was trying to work out where we were, I must have missed them taking Cat away.
"She warned us..." Beck mumbled. "That if we take off our binds in the van we'd get hurt-"
"-and they thought she took hers off." Andre finished, gulping at the end of his sentence.
A sudden sob caught my ears, and I looked over to Vega, expecting the sound to be coming from here. However when there were no tears in sight, I realised the noise came from me. My eyes dripped with tears. My walls, the walls that hold me up, make me strong just... collapsed. Moment by moment, they fell. Salty drops fell from my chin, drenching the mouth gag and my shirt. I was trembling. I couldn't stop. It was raw, everything, raw tears, raw emotions. I couldn't stop... I couldn't stop. Why couldn't I not stop crying?
Beck shuffled over to me, his hands and legs still tied together. "She'll be okay Babe." He tried to comfort me. "She's strong."
I started to calm down at the sound of his voice. My breathing rate slowly returning to normal. In. Out. In. Out. Everyone around me was in silence, watching my recovery. In. Out. In. Out. Just breathe. "She's strong." I mentally repeated Beck words of comfort to myself.
In... out... in... out. That's it, I've got this breathing thing back again. But with all good things, something always ruins it. A blood curdling scream echoed from outside the room. It sounded like a scream of wild panic. A scream of hysteria and disbelief, bordering on terror. It made the hair strand straight up on the back of my neck. It was the loudest most piercing scream I had ever heard. The blood drained from my face and adrenaline surged through my veins. Before I was even aware of making a conscious decision, my arms were snapped out to my sides. I'd just broken the zip-tie. I don't remember how, but my hands were free and only slightly bleeding from the friction. I pulled off the gag and jumped to my feet, hobbling over to the metal door and started slamming my hands violently into it. "STOP HURTING HER!" I called out. "CAT!" The door was solid metal. Nothing was going to budge it. The surface was flat and shiny like the outside of a stainless steel refrigerator. There was no handle, no lock, no hinges, nothing to get a grip on. The top and bottom, even the sides, lay so utterly flush with the frame that there was no hope of pulling it open even if we had a crowbar, but we had nothing of the sort.
A few moments of silence followed, the wait more mentally draining then her screaming. At least then we knew she was still alive. I continued to pound my hands into the door, I knew I was wasting energy but it was all I could do. "CAT!" I called out periodically. "Please!"
Suddenly, the door suddenly re-opened, sending me flying backwards onto my butt. My eye's met the man who'd opened it as he launched Cat into the room. She fell face-first into the room, clutching her left arm. "Ah." She whimpered as her body fell.
"Have fun." The man said evilly, slamming the door shut and re-locking it.
"Cat!" Andre said, rushing towards her a the same time as me. "W...what happened?!"
"My shoulder." She said though clenched teeth, holding her shoulder with her left hand. "They... they dislocated it." Tears started to flow down her cheeks as I helped her sit upright. (A/N I'm literally writing this with a dislocated shoulder. Typing hurts, everything hurts. Don't do sports kids. xD)
"It's okay." I tried to comfort her. "Let me have a look a it."
Reluctantly, Cat removed her right hand from covering her left shoulder. I had to hide my gagging as I saw her arm hanging loosely out of it's socket, swinging by her side. "How did they even do that?" Andre gasped, hobbling over towards us.
Cat looked up at us properly and I could see the bruise on her face starting to swell and form into a black/blue colour. There were scratched too, presumably from the floor. Her eyes had frozen over like the surface of a winter puddle, robbing them of their usual warmth. She was in there, I knew it, but it's like the pain was dominating her body it's fiery bursts pulsating through her. "They..." She started to wipe away her tears and clearing all expression and emotion from her face, like an indestructible mask. "They threw me to the ground in a room, across the halfway from this one-" the way she talked made it seem as if she hadn't been crying seconds prior, clear and robotic like -"then one man put his foot on my back, between my shoulder blades." She paused momentarily to keep her composure. "He started yelling things, I don't know what, and then grabbed my left arm and started pulling it back, while putting more pressure on my back. Until... well it just came out and I think I screamed-"
"You did." Beck said, his face pale as he mentally picture the image. "Cat... that's... oh my god." He gagged as he talked.
"Either way, I need to put this back in." She cringed, motioning to her still hanging arm.
"H... how?" I asked.
"The only way you can I guess." She sighed, placing her right hand on the elbow on her left hand and violently shoving upwards. There were a few moments of silence, followed by another one of Cat's blood curdling screams. We can never truly feel another's pain, but that scream of Cat's came close. It was the kind of scream that puts every other thought on hold and roots everyone close in the very same agony. A very pained expression covered Cat's face as her body tried to cope with the pain. I rushed forward and enveloped the smaller girl into a hug, careful to not touch her already damaged arm. "Lucky I know... how to... do that." She joked through clenched teeth, her pain filled tears spilling onto the shoulder of my shirt.