Read Taken (Breaking the Darkness) for Free Online

her sides. She wore a corset-like blouse accentuating her small waist and curvaceous hips. The crowns of her breasts spilled out the top.
    She was striking in more ways than one. Her hair was straight and as black as a panther’s. I might not have noticed her hair color or her black clothes if it weren’t for the fact that she seemed to radiate a red hue. Her stature was dominating, but from my crouching position it was hard to tell if it was the stiletto boots or if she was wicked tall.
    Perhaps I spent a moment too many noticing how striking her appearance was; before I knew it, she smacked me in the face. Even though she didn’t make direct contact with my nose, she hit me hard enough that I got that weird smelly twang in my nostrils.
    “Are you too good to say anything to me?” she hissed at me. “You must think you’re something special?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I coughed out. It was hard for me to speak with my mouth full of the warm metallic fluid. After wiping the bloody drool from my chin, I managed to come back with, “Who are you…? Where am I?” I had much more to say and ask, but all that came out were grunts and groans from the pain. Somehow I managed not to break down in tears. I was sure that would come later.
    She reached down slow and calculated, grabbing me by the throat. Her hands seemed large for a woman. I could feel all her fingers as they wrapped forcefully around my neck. She lifted me, the broken rag doll, right up off the floor. I felt my feet dangling below me. I didn’t even consider taking a breath. I just looked at her dead on. Her eyes were black, two onyx holes with an endless supply of nothing behind them.
    “You will show your true self to me or you will suffer. I will make sure of that, over and over again.”
    Her teeth were blindingly white as they flashed through an unpleasant smile that never neared her eyes. She snapped at me and began to laugh. And with that I felt her head come crashing into mine, only to leave me in total darkness again.
     

 

     
     
    I FELT THE heat of something burning outside my eyelids. I wasn’t really ready to consider what might be waiting for me on the other side. I decided to push myself up to a sitting position just before allowing the hot reality to bombard my ocular senses.
    Surprisingly, my movements weren’t hindered by what I expected to be an unforgiving amount of pain. With my eyes still closed, I lifted my hands to my face and caressed my smooth skin. It felt as it always did. I anticipated at least one aspect of my face to be protruding with tenderness. My eyes, on the other hand, squinted from the intensity of an external light source.
    Apprehensively, I allowed my eyes to drift open. The hot yellow light beaming down from the sky wasn’t at all what I expected to see. At this point, I realized the sun warmed my whole body. Bathing in the rich sunlight was something I would never again take for granted.
    Looking down to find my hands perched on pillows of white sand, I listened for the crashing of the waves. I knew the ocean couldn’t be far. Letting my ears do the work, I searched for the sounds of the sea—silence between the whispers of wind. Could the ocean be so still?
    Rising up with my toes still covered in a blanket of white sand, I slowly started pivoting my body to scan my surroundings. Dunes of white were all around me. As far as the eye could see there were mounds of white topped with a sheet of sweet baby blue, not a cloud in the sky above. It almost felt like I floated amongst them.
    My eyes squinted, trying to defend against the harsh rays from above and the glare from below. The fact that the sand beneath my feet was actually cool to the touch, despite the heat of the sun, clued me in to my location.
    I remembered Gram bringing me to White Sands, New Mexico, when I was a young girl. We found cardboard boxes in the trunk and used them as makeshift sleds. The images of us giggling as