Page 20 of Freed By Wrath

My phone. My wallet. My keys.

The car.

Reality crashes together all at once, each thought louder than the last until I can’t separate one from another and my chest tightens.

I try to inhale, but my lungs constrict, and the breath stops halfway.

Again.

Nothing.

The cotton covering my face suddenly feels suffocating, trapping every panicked breath against my mouth until there’s no fresh air left to steal.

No.

No.

Please…

My fingers curl uselessly against the couch, my hands sweating and my heart swelling so much in my chest that I—

I can’t… I can’t breathe.

Warm tears spill down my cheeks, disappearing into the borrowed T-shirt before I even realize I’m crying.

The room tilts. Or maybe I do.

Something moves in front of me, close enough that the air changes.

“Val?”

The calm in his voice disappears.

“Hey… hey, look at me.”

The T-shirt is pulled from my face and light blinds me, but I barely register it.

The only thing I feel are rough, calloused hands grounding themselves against my shoulders as my lungs refuse to remember the one thing they’ve been doing my entire life.

Breathe.

His hands are warm. Steady.

They don’t shake while mine won’t stop.

I hate that the first thing my body registers isn’t fear. It’s relief.

But it doesn’t matter because my chest refuses to loosen.

Every breath catches somewhere behind my ribs, never quite making it to my lungs. The already blurred edges of my vision intensify, until the world dissolves into only light and sound.

Then everything goes black.

5

Isaac

Our hostage is unconscious on the couch, and both of my best friends are looking at me like I personally orchestrated this disaster. Which I didn’t. That honor belongs entirely to Slash. But try explaining that to the part of my brain currently running through every possible legal consequence of tonight.