Nothing about anything made sense anymore. Not the affectionate way he nuzzled against her. Not the gentle way he set her onto the ground. Let alone what happened next. She slumped against the ground, vaguely aware she should probably try to run. But her legs felt like rubber, and he'd caught her easily the last time, when she'd still been in peak condition. She doubted she would get very far. So she just stayed slumped on the floor, trying to recover, physically and mentally. Relieved that he wasn't already fucking her again. Still reeling in shock. Tired, really tired, because she hadn't gotten much rest before she bolted, and then it had been running through the rain and climbing and getting fucked stupid by a battering ram.
Nothing made sense, especially not when he wandered off and came back with her hoodie. Not when he knelt down and akwardly tried to put it on her like a blanket. She stared at him in abject bewilderment. He brushed against the side of her face with his thumb, then ran his claws gently through her hair. She shivered, and he licked her face, and for a moment, she was worried he'd get randy again and start all over. But instead, he stepped back, and sort of... knelt down, watching her.
She stared back, confused beyond words.
She looked down at the hoodie, then held it up in front of her, examining it as if looking for the trap. She stared back up at him again.
Slowly, nervously, she unzipped it and wrapped it around her, rather than pull it over her head and be unable to see what he was doing for even a moment. The damp, baggy hoodie was torn in at least two places, but it still mostly covered her. Now the inside was smeared with glittery semen, which was also staining pretty much all of the insides of both her legs. Her face was probably a mess with it too. And her hair.
He still wasn't moving.
Not taking her eyes off of him, she backed up slowly towards the window. He didn't move to stop her. She gripped the wood and pulled herself up. When he still didn't move, she scrambled rapidly up to the top, stiffly and a bit awkwardly, sore in strange places. Finally, when she reached the top, she turned to look at him one last time. He still hadn't moved. He was just watching her.
She was almost certainly pregnant with something terrifying.
She shook her head, turned, and scrambled out into the night.
She'd gotten clothes. She'd gotten food. She'd even gotten money. And she hadn't had to rob a single person, which had been her plan. She'd been fully intending to go around asking to borrow cell phones and running off with them, a con that would be easier to pull now that she looked like she'd been hazed by a sorority. Instead, she'd gotten lucky the first time and wound up not needing any of that.
She'd gone to a library. She had food, money, an emergency jar of frosting, and, most comfortingly of all, a pocket rat, who had been resting happily in the pocket of her normal, not oversized, not rapist hoodie.
Unfortunately, her luck didn't hold, because of course it didn't. It never did. She didn't have luck so much as she had an ancient curse, probably.
It was night, and she'd hidden under an overhang, since it was threatening to rain again and still quite puddle-y. She wasn't going to risk any fucking churches, that was for damn sure. That turned out to be a mistake, because as it turned out, human traffickers took their jobs very seriously. She was recognized.
Her plan had been to take off, and lose them in back alleys again. It had worked the first time.
The first time, however, they hadn't shot at her.
She had absolutely no fucking idea why they did it. Surely she'd be useless to them dead. Surely the sound of gun fire, even though it had been bizarrely quiet, would attract attention, even in this dark, seemingly abandoned side of town. But they had, and it had grazed her leg, and now she was limp-running and trailing blood, soaking the leg of her too-large jeans. Now she wasn't scared of being re-kidnapped; she was scared of being killed.
And she couldn't outrun them.
It was the stupidest idea, but it fixated in her panicked mind. She knew where something more dangerous than a man with a gun lived. And she knew how to get in.
That was why she was now crawling through the same fucking hole she'd crawled out of 18 hours prior. A quiet bullet buried into the wood near her shoulder before she managed to throw herself through the hole, tearing her sleeve on the broken glass. She fell to the ground with a pained thud, quite the contrast to the delicate drop from before.
It wasn't quite sanctuary, but it would do.
Unfortunately, large, angry men didn't need to climb twelve feet straight up. She heard them smashing through the half-rotten wood on the window below, the shattering of glass.