George pov

When I awoke I had a headache.

Pain shot through my skull as my head lolled from side to side in my now feigned unconsciousness.

Despite it seemingly only adding to the migraine at hand, I needed to allow my entire body to be slack, making my head shift from left to right in quick succession.

I was in a car, what kind, I didn't know, which meant I also didn't know what part of the vehicle I was in, or where the driver was.

But I could hear the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels, meaning I had to still be on a public road.

The car cut through the wind at an obviously quick pace, much faster than what was allowed. Were we perhaps on the backroads?

I stayed limp as I heard minimal noises come from inside the van.

A cough, rough and sickly. Perhaps one of my captors was under the weather.

The clearing of a throat, obviously feminine.

Then, silence.

Maybe it was nice, being able to relax and think before I was thrown into the thick of yet another capture.

It had been years since the last one, and I had at the very least gotten a relative drug immunity, making whatever toxin they had forced into my body to make me pass out wear off sooner than it should have.

It only gave me a slight edge, though, and unless one of the drivers began talking soon, I wouldn't have that much of an advantage in getting out of here quickly.

It was silent for a while, and k was beginning to brainstorm any possible ideas for an easy escape, but my headache made that difficult.

Then, by a stroke of luck, I heard voices.

"Sooo... party was good?" the woman asked.

There was quiet again, briefer and lighter this time before another scruffy voice spoke.

"It was alright." Silence once more, but the noise was now more important.

There was no one else that spoke, and my suspicions that I was surrounded only by two people was confirmed.

I chanced a glance around the car, trying only to assess my position.

I was in the small backseat of a pickup truck, with two people in front of me.

One was a woman with long golden hair and a black mask covering her face.

To her left sat a man, two hands on the steering wheel, with his entire face covered by a crimson red ski mask mixed with hues of gold and sunset orange.

Neither looked to be too much of a threat.

I closed my eyes again, waiting a while before making any other moves.

Slowly, I began to rub my wrists together to find that they were bound by wire, the string cutting into my skin, making me suppress a whine.

Pain was such a futile thing, something that everyone in this business had been subjected to, meaning that new forms of torture were being developed each day as ways to get information or leverage.

I held back a scoff.

It was animalistic, really, the way everyone in the mafia ran after money or drugs or alcohol just for leverage over the other, just for territory or more reign over the city to spread their terrorizing to.

The worst thing was, I was almost out.

My mother and I were almost free, had almost escaped what my dead father found a way to choke us with even in his ghostly form.

And she had died.

Godsdamn it, she had died.

I hadn't been careful enough, hadn't been keen.

Everyone at the party had been working under the same mafia, one I didn't know about.

The thought alone scared me.

The idea that there was an organization that was plotting my mother's death that I had never known of awoke a new yet old emotion in me.

Fear.

It was the reason I was sitting in the back of a pickup truck now, trying to plot my escape, waiting for any hidden glimpse of hope to grasp onto.

It was the reason my mother, who had only hours before been twirling in her beauteous champagne gown, surrounded by her own laughter, was now a bloodied corpse that knew nothing of the love we had both shared.

I struggled not to clench my teeth in anger, or to ball up my hands with grief.

I tried my best not to let the cursed tears I had no reason to create in years spill from my closed eyes.

I wanted to follow my mother. Fuck, did I want to follow her if only so that she wouldn't be alone in death, but I knew I couldn't.

Even if I didn't care for them on a personal level, I had thousands of men at my command now, willed into my creed by the mere respect they held for my deceased father.

They were meant to get out, too.

Finally, after a generation of watching their fathers go mad with the craze of killing and witnessing their mothers die at the hands of their leader's grudges, they would have been free as I could have been.

Now they weren't, and I didn't know to where they had dispersed in the unfortunate wake of my weakness.

I needed to get back to them.

I owed those thousands of men my life, at the very least, and freedom at the peak of my debt.

I would die before I failed to deliver this to them, just as they had died so that I could live just a little bit longer.

My mothers death left me at a loss, but it placed me in the center of my awakening somehow.

I hadn't realized it before, but in her time of grief after my father had died, I was at her side, submerged in an anguish of my own.

Where her tears fell, they were met with drops of blood in my anger with the man, the wrath I could no longer inflict on my dad.

I had been killing relentlessly these past five years, if only to ease the pain of the childhood he had commanded.

I had grieved, too, and now I was at a loss.

It had weakened me past my time of weakness, and I was paying the price.

My thoughts were shattered as I felt the car come to a stop, two doors opening simultaneously and closing in quick succession.

There were footsteps that were obviously padded with a ground of loose dirt, but they came closer to me anyway.

Then, the door to my right opened and my eyes followed suit, my body already moving.

It was time to fight.

1121 words