165 – Kidnapped
Scarlett got up at five o’clock as usual and continued the routine. And as she was waiting for the newspaper, she heard Julie delivering it from far away.
“Miss Scarlett! Your picture!”
Scarlett picked up the newspaper with her eyes wide open to the excited voice. Indeed, Scarlett’s face was in the newspaper.
“Really…”
“Everyone on 7th Avenue is amazed! Oh, I’m leaving!”
“Yes, thank you!”
Scarlett tilted her head again, checking her face after Julie, who was always busy, left.
“Andrei submitted it? If it were Isaac, he would have told me.….”
Andrei still had a long way to go to work. How could she wait for him to come? Scarlett already felt frustrated.
As she returned to the second floor and opened the newspaper on the workbench, wondering why her face was on it, she heard Liv’s voice on the opposite side.
“Scarlett! There’s your face in the newspaper!”
“Yes, I know.”
Scarlett looked embarrassed. She checked the title of the article and lost her countenance.
[Come to Crimson’s watch store]
Scarlett was embarrassed by the watch store advertisement she had never published and felt great anxiety.
“Did I ask for this before?”
Whenever something she didn’t remember happened, she became the first to doubt her memory.
Scarlett stared at the newspaper for a long time, groping over the memories of running this ad. But no matter how hard she thought about it, this had never happened.
“That’s crazy, really…”
Scarlett muttered and wrapped her hand around her face. Still, she pushed the newspaper aside and started working because she had much work.
She didn’t even know about the disturbance happening outside after a while because she could barely hear the sound when focused on the work. Then belatedly, she woke up surprised that the store was full of smoke. “Scarlett!”
She heard Liv calling her name outside and someone running upstairs.
Scarlett stumbled, feeling dizzy, and found masked men coming in with windows open in the smoke. While they pulled Scarlett and put a drugged towel in her mouth, two young men ran up the stairs and shouted. One of the masked men jumped out of the window carrying Scarlett.
The masked men had ropes on their backs, so they ran vertically against the wall and headed behind the building. As the floor approached, he broke the rope and got off the floor and started running. And while running down the alley, Scarlett lost consciousness.
♔♔♔
When Scarlett opened her eyes again, she saw the high ceiling of the factory. As she groaned and raised her upper body, pirates gathered and looked down at her.
Instead of allowing pirates to live in the capital, Salantier’s court marked them so people could recognise them.
Pirates tattooed their bodies every time they killed a man and marked them red if they killed a navy. The Navy executed the pirates who killed civilians on the spot. But the pirates who killed members of the Navy were sent to prison instead of executed.
All those caught in the pirate ship had their right eye removed and used a golden bill. The plan was to mark pirates who liked gold coins.
Children under the age of fifteen were spared the punishment, so the cries of despair from the children and their parents had been heard far outside the executive chamber.
At that time, pirates had drugs that allowed their eyes to regrow from the beginning.
In Salantier, pirates could never cover their eyes. Now that she knew the medicine, she thought about it, she couldn’t cover her eyes, but if she used it, she’d be caught.
Scarlett forced herself up. She fell back to the floor, feeling dizzy from the drug. She heard a horse above.
It was hard to understand because it was the language of Vestina, not Salantier, but the words that sounded between the speakers were almost similar in pronunciation, making it possible to infer most of them.
Shouted the man with the golden bill, who had walked from afar. “You know the captain never negotiates with pirates!”
“But Harold! I’m 18 years old now. I have to live with these golden eyes all my life!”
Scarlett couldn’t breathe properly because of the smoked stench from the factory.
The young men alternately spoke.
“I’m going to ask you to let me use the drug for my eyes. I don’t think Viktor would give up anything great for this girl either.”
“Sean!”
“I didn’t know anything when I was young! It’s just that I grew up watching adults do it, and I thought pirates were the best jobs, and I grew up like this!”
“Now you’re risking the whole island of our capital!” Harold ranted, but the lads wouldn’t listen.
Scarlett seemed paralysed with fear but somehow tried to decipher what on earth was happening. The conversation was confusing enough to follow.
She crawled onto the factory floor and curled up in the corner. And to avoid screaming, she covered her mouth with her hands and shook her whole body.