Mercy would never admit it to any of her friendsespecially not Annebut she was a closet Taylor Swift fan. Mercy had even liked her at the start of the singers career, when shed been a country act. The only person who knew Mercy was a Taylor Swift fan was her mother…and that was only because she had walked into Mercys room when Mercy had been jamming out to Blank Space a year or so ago. It was a memory that Mercy held dear because rather than teasing her, her mother had danced with her in a spontaneous moment of goofinessa moment that had ended with her mother making a shushing gesture and saying: Your secret is safe with me.

Mercy thought about that moment as she once again traced the shape and size of her dark prison. She thought of her mother, trying to grasp the fact that both of her parents were now dead. Or so she assumed, anyway. The way her father had screamed for her to run…there had been terror in his voice. And then the gunshots…

Thankfully, Mercy had Blank Space on repeat in her head, drowning out the sound of that memory.

She came to the end of what she was starting to think of as her prison cell. She felt the corner, where the two walls met. She was fairly certain that was she was thinking of as the end of her cell was a door of some kind. Based on the size and shape of whatever she was being held in, she thought the door would be the kind that rolled up, like the back of a U-Haul. When she thought of that, she was pretty sure the shape and size of her prison was pretty close to that. Maybe she was in a storage unit, or one of those big moving containers.

She got down on her hands and knees and felt at the space where the floor met what she now assumed was a door. There was the slightest dip between the floor and all five feet of the door. In the center of it, she felt some sort of indentation in the doorone that was supposed to be there, perhaps feeding further down into the floor where some kind of a latch held the door closed. She dug her fingers into that indentation but could feel nothing. If she was being held in some sort of moving container or trailer, she was pretty sure the only way to open it was from the outside.

As she investigated the door, she heard a light squeaking noise coming from somewhere off in the distance. It sounded like a door opening and then closing. She then heard light footsteps and then…whistling.

It was him. He was back.