Chapter 26
Finnick ran through the hallways of the sterile white lab. His trident was gripped tightly in his right hand, out of a mixture of excitement and anxiety. He rounded a corner and stopped short, freezing.
Above the door in front of him was a sign that read 'Subject 3 – Bowman.' He kicked the door in after trying the knob (which was locked.) His breath caught in his throat as he saw her.
She was strapped to a lab table, her eyes closed and her chest awfully still. There was terrifying moment when he thought she was dead, but the beeping of a heart monitor calmed his fear. He rushed over, his fingers fumbling as he struggled to undo the straps holding her down.
Finally the last one was undone, and he scooped her up. Her eyes opened slowly, full of confusion upon seeing his face. "F-Finn?"
He smiled softly. "Yeah. It's me."
"You abandoned me... You left me to die in the Capitol... How could you?"
He could practically hear the spiderweb of cracks snaking their way along his heart. It shattered completely at her next words.
"I thought you loved me... But you didn't, did you? If you loved me, you would have rescued me before the Capitol killed me."
"What...? Reyna, I love you! You're here, I did save you. You're not dead." He managed to force out, his concern growing.
"Look again."
And he did.
The hairs on his neck stood straight up in alarm. In his arms was not beautiful, healthy Reyna. Her eyes were blank and white. Her skin was ash gray, her lips a darker rendition of the same color. She was cold in his arms, chilling him to the bone. It was like she drained the life from him.
The blood rushed from his face, and he tried to let go of her corpse, to scramble back, every cell in his body screaming to run. She raised a dead hand to cup his cheek. "Let me show you the pain of dying without your lover, knowing they were the reason for your death." She breathed softly.
He wanted to scream and shout, but no words were allowed to leave his mouth. Reyna laughed, a cold, heartless sound that froze his blood. She kissed him softly, with her lifeless lips, and agony tore through him, spreading from his heart like a snake's venom.
She pulled away with a cruel smile. "See you in Hell."
Finnick sat up in his bunk with a shout. His eyes were wide, the iris almost completely swallowed by black. His breath came out in ragged gasps that his heaving chest produced, and a cold sweat covered his skin. That was the third nightmare this week, and by far the worst.
He felt for the necklace where it rested against his skin, taking small comfort in the fact that Snow would be broadcasting her death over all of Panem if she had indeed died. It didn't really help much.
He sighed, swinging his legs over the edge of the bunk and dropping to the floor with cat-like silence. He wasn't going to get any sleep, and since Katniss had coaxed him into fighting with the Rebellion, he needed to be in tip-top shape. Which was a good excuse for being in the gym at ungodly hours. Pretty much every night.
Reyna was slumped against the side of her cell, trying to rest. The venom coursing through her body had mostly drained out, which told her that soon she would be taken to the lab for another dose.
Lately it wasn't the scientist injecting her or interrogating her. It was Finnick. She had heard of things like this, prisoners going insane and hurting their loved ones for 'no reason.'
She gasped as another spasm of pain flashed through her, followed by that icy cold. She dug her nails into the cement under her hands as Johanna came back, her head shaven. All of her hair was gone. Jo nodded discreetly at her friend. It was time.
Reyna was up in the blink of an eye. She grabbed the guard's collar and pulled him closer to the bars of her cell door. A second later she snapped his neck, taking his gun and keycard and letting his body drop. She tossed Johanna the gun, after the other woman had killed her own guard.
Jo shot down the other Peacekeepers while Reyna opened her cell, quickly releasing Peeta and Mags as well. The brown-haired woman took two more pistols and ran ahead, leaving Johanna to cover the others.
Reyna gunned down several guards, and after she was out of rounds she picked up a few blades from the lab tables around her. She would wait until the guards came around a corner to slit their throats silently. They never knew what got them.
She turned into a hallway and froze, confronted with multiple angry Peacekeepers. And by multiple I mean at least fifteen.
She ducked away from their bullets, rolling to her feet and firing several rounds with the pistols she picked up from a guard along the way. The good thing about so many of them? She just had to shoot in their general direction and at least one of them would get hit.
There were only a few left when she took a bullet. A scream bubbled in her throat, and she dropped her left-hand pistol to put a hand over her side. Blood spilled from between her fingers, and waves of hot pain radiated from that one spot. The rest of her felt like ice.
She struggled to her feet (having fallen to her knees) and shot the rest down. After the last one was dead, she slowly made her way along until she was at President Snow's office.
The door was unlocked, which should have set off alarms in her head. But her judgement was slightly impaired by the wound in her side from where the bullet had grazed her, though it certainly wasn't just a scrape. Jo and the others were somewhere else, long gone. She went inside and locked the door behind her.
Snow was in his chair, a smug expression on his face. "I've been expecting your company, Miss Bowman."
"Yeah, I bet you have, you son of a–"
A hand clamped over her mouth, cutting her off. The person behind her snaked his other hand to her bullet wound, making her freeze. He chuckled, right next to her ear. "It's not nice to say bad things like that, Reyna."
She cried out when he dug his finger in the wound, making her squirm. Finnick laughed at her pain, pulling his red-coated hand away from her side. He wiped the blood on her shirt and pushed her to the ground roughly.
Reyna was too weak from the pain and blood loss to do anything but try to remind herself that it couldn't be Finnick, that he wouldn't do this. But it was him. That was his voice, his hands, his eyes. Eyes that gleamed with sadistic pleasure as he pointed a gun at her head. "See you in Hell."
Bang.
Bạn đang đọc truyện trên: Truyen247.Pro