not
much,” she explained, her voice breaking with her effort to sit
up.
“Don’t move,” he ordered. “You said your leg
was broken?” She nodded. “Let me look at it.” As he moved to the
other side of her body, his pant leg landed in something cold under
her body. Before he made to move again, he resolved that he would
kill her himself if it was piss. “ Why are you all wet?”
She visibly flinched, even in the dark. “You
don’t need to know what they do to me, here,” she said.
That was all she said on the matter.
A bit perturbed by her disagreeable remarks,
he ignored her for a moment and focused on her leg instead. Taran
was accustomed to disgusting injuries when on missions, but even he
had to give a shudder at the state of her shin. The skin had grown
over it in a bulbous, shiny scar, but the bone was clearly split,
the bottom half pointing out over the top. He was surprised she
could feel the leg at all in the state it was in. It would be a
grueling process to fix it, and she would most likely never regain
full use, but he wished to help her in any way he could. As
unskilled as she was, he was fully aware of how malicious Natalia
Petrov could be.
“Hey kid?” he murmured.
“Ya?” she mumbled, too exhausted to even ask
him not to call her that.
“Why are you here?” he asked, thinking over
ways that he could lessen her pain. Ordinarily, he would have
knocked out whatever friend he was helping, but, given how thin the
girl was, such a blow to the head could kill her.
“I caught that… Natalia …on camera after
she robbed the British museum,” Janie explained, drawing a heart
into the dust with her index finger.
“Hm…consider yourself lucky. Anyone in her
place should have killed you.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind of that. Except,
I still have the pictures. I hid them,” she grimaced unkindly. She
hadn’t smiled genuinely since before her captivity and didn’t
expect to ever again.
“And you don’t want to die? Even after being
with Natalia for so long?” he inquired, prodding her skin while she
hissed with each painful touch.
“I think it’s more that I just don’t want her
to have them,” she amended quickly.
“She’ll make you suffer,” he warned, tearing
the leg of her tights at the knee to prevent the fabric from
sticking to the dried blood painting her shin.
“Believe me…Taran, was it?...I’ve been
suffering every day since I got here.”
“What did you say your name was?” he inquired
after a moment of mentally piecing together her face under the
thick layer of grime. He suspected she could have been beautiful at
one time, before Natalia’s malice had ruined her. He enjoyed her
attitude about her situation and her own martyrdom.
“Janie,” she informed him.
“Well, Janie ,” he admitted, “your leg
is going to need to be re-broken if you ever want to walk again. I
can do it now if you want me to.”
Her eyes shot open with panic. “Is it going
to hurt?”
“Yes,” he answered without missing a beat,
positioning his hands where he would need to push the bone back
into place.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she
whimpered, flailing her arms around for something to hold on
to.
“I saw worse as a Marine in Iraq for two
years and I have a basic medical training. Besides, I’ve done it a
few times,” he vowed, letting his eyes meet hers in the dim orange
light, willing her to trust him.
Biting her lip, she nodded reluctantly.
Her bloodcurdling scream echoed off the
walls, but Taran could expect no less as he broke her leg and
attempted to fit the bone back to where it should be, binding it
tightly with his belt and shoe so it would remain flat. He couldn’t
tell if Janie was still conscious, her eyes heavy-lidded but glazed
over, and the top half of her body was turned to the side. Her
abdomen heaved with useless thrusts from the otherworldly pain, but
there was obviously nothing in her stomach to expel. She didn’t
seem to be