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Aleksi stirs in his sleep, his eyes fluttering open. There’s a looming sense of dread weighing heavily on his shoulders and tightening around his throat. He can’t shake the feeling that something is very wrong.
He’s about to pass it off as a lingering dream waking him when there’s a creak. Aleksi freezes, his heart skipping a beat. Because it’s not just the building shifting, or a neighbour moving around in the next apartment. It’s coming from outside Aleksi’s bedroom, down the short hallway leading to his front door. It’s the distinctive squeak of the shitty floorboard halfway away from the door, the one that the landlord kept saying he’d repair.
Aleksi’s pulse skyrockets when he realises it, his hands clenching at the hem of his sleep shirt. The floorboard squeaks again, and once more after that. Footsteps.
He can hear them creeping along the hallway outside his door, careful and slow, growing steadily louder. There are several sets approaching and Aleksi needs to get up. He needs to leave, not cower here under his blanket, his face hidden as if it could protect him. He’s on the tenth floor– there’s no way for him to escape out the window. Aleksi is starting to consider screaming, maybe then someone will hear him and call the cops–
The bedroom door creaks open.
Aleksi doesn’t breathe. He’s not sure he could if he wanted to. His chest is strung tight with the sharpest panic he’s ever felt -- like a rubber band stretched tight. Maybe if he’s quiet, complicit, if he lets them take what they want and promises not to tell they’ll leave him alone, or at least not hurt him too badly–
A large, heavy hand lands on the exposed top of Aleksi’s head, yanking the blanket off his face. And the rubber band finally snaps. Aleksi opens his mouth, the beginnings of a scream wrenching loose, before an equally large hand slaps over his mouth, muffling it. “Shut up,” a low voice growls from above him, and the hand on his head knots into his hair. Aleksi whimpers, the fear and pain starting to prick at his eyes. A tear escapes, running down his cheek as he’s yanked up.
Aleksi gasps, trying to scrabble to sit up where the hand is pulling him, still muffled by the hand covering his mouth. His scalp is burning with the pressure, and Aleksi starts gabbling out pleas as soon as the hand lifts off his mouth for a brief second, begging for the man to leave him alone, that they could take anything they wanted. The man scoffs, clapping his palm back over Aleksi’s pleading mouth.
It’s then that Aleksi finally looks up to face his attacker, meeting the towering figure of the man holding him, the size of his body clearly matching the hands attached, and the dull look of boredom in his eyes just as cruel. Behind him, in the blue moonlight filtering through his curtains, he can see the shape of two other men, shorter and more slight than the first, but Aleksi could see the flash of light reflecting off a strange, hooked blade in the taller man’s hands.
He starts shaking his head vehemently as the shorter of the two begins to come closer, the movement pulling so painfully at his scalp that he can feel strands of hair ripping loose from the skin. Aleksi starts mindlessly babbling again as the man comes up right behind the one holding Aleksi, resting his head against the larger man’s thick bicep. “Don’t you see?” He hums, voice mockingly sweet, “We are taking what we want.”
Aleksi can see the curl of a smirk on the new man’s lips, but he’s so stricken with panic that he only stares dumbly at him, tears running hot down his face, wetting the skin of the fingers pressing down over his mouth and cheek. The man rolls his eyes.
“Stop fucking playing, man,” the man holding Aleksi grunts, his fingers tightening painfully in Aleksi’s hair. Aleksi squeezes his eyes shut, the pressure in his head building tenfold. They’re going to fucking kill him, and there’s nothing he can do about it .
There’s shifting before the hand on his mouth lifts off again, and this time, before Aleksi can even think to scream or beg, there’s the sticky press of a strip of tape being smoothed across his mouth. “Let’s get him into the car, c’mon,” a new voice says, and then someone is pulling a sack over his head, blinding him.
Finally, blissfully despite the circumstances, the hand clenched in his hair releases, dispersing across the whole of his head before finally disappearing. His minute relief is short-lived though, as he’s seized roughly around the middle, being lifted off the bed and tossed carelessly over a shoulder.
Then he’s moving. He’s being carried, Aleksi thinks numbly through the terror, out of his house. “Don’t make any noise now,” the third voice says, “we don’t want to make a commotion for the neighbours,”
Aleksi feels the tip of something sharp and cold being pressed against the skin of his throat, and he swallows hard, his breath caught.
“Let’s go,” he hears again, and hopelessness and dread settle like a stone in the pit of Aleksi’s stomach. It’s a bad part of town.
No one will even notice that he’s gone.