Chapter 56

                                    

                                          
"Ugh." Alex's eyes felt like they had been glued shut, every bone in her body battered and bruised as if hit with a hammer. Her hands still stung but when she managed to part her eyelids, what she wasn't expecting was her hands to be bandaged, beneath the covers in her old room. Her torn shirt had been replaced and her shoes taken off. She attempted to sit up but was forced back onto the mattress by an invisible force that was continuously punching her ribs. "Ow."
Pain. Definitely not dead then.
The clock beside the bed read 13:23, the day after she had arrived. 
Out for over twenty four hours, must have been hit real good. 
Just as she was taking some breaths, filling her lungs with oxygen she had been deprived of constantly recently, (did strangling become a popular method of murder recently or something?) she heard someone pottering down stairs. From the sound of it, they were in the kitchen, making food of some kind from the sounds of pots and pans and the whirring of the extractor fan that was a steady humming, white noise in the background.
She looked around the room and spotted her knife on the chair on the other side, just by her bookshelf. It could have been the person who saved her but even so, Alex didn't know if she could trust them - she had no clue who they worked for, who they were, how they managed to be there at that moment or why they helped her.
Despite feeling as though she had been run-over by a truck, twice, she still found the will-power and strength to attempt getting up, determined on getting the knife to see who was in her house. 
Pushing through the intense force on her chest, she lifted herself up. 
During the fight, her brain hadn't registered the counter punches to her chest, the bruise where the gun was pressed into her stomach, adrenaline having masked everything. 
Now, she got to feel all of it full force. Her head was splitting with the effort. She reached up and found it bound in a sterile, white bandage though it did nothing to diminish the heat that made her breathing laboured from the injury sustained to the bone. 
But still Alex moved, swinging her legs over the side of the bed, hissing with the exertion. She put some pressure on her legs and feeling no pain, she stood up properly but falling to the ground when her chest gave in and sent her sprawling onto the thin rug. The pain in her head had reduced to a dull throbbing but the pain in her abdomen more than made up for it. Alex groaned before snapping her mouth shut, a smidgen of fear entering her heart.
The noises downstairs had stopped, only to be replaced by the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
"Ah crap." Alex dragged herself towards the knife, one arm clutching her chest. Her fingers barely brushed the handle when the door flew open.
"What the hell are you doing?" That voice was familiar, annoyingly familiar.
"You have got to be kidding me."
He smirked, that annoying, horrible smirk that came through with his true personality. Really, he was self-assured and confident to the point where he was egotistical and cocky but not a bad agent, from what she had seen so far. But Alex was not going to let her facial expressions show her relief at seeing him. 
"What, don't want to see this pretty face?"
She looked around the room in confusion. "Where? I don't see one."
"Hardy har har. Now can you stop clutching that knife like you're going to stab me? I don't really want to come any closer, even though you're super weak right now. You probably have some crazy skill needing no power that will paralyse me or kill me on the spot."