16: Beatrice

I woke to a sharp pain in my side, the red hot fingers of fire stretched through my chest and grabbed hold of whatever pieces of flesh they could find. 

The pain was debilitating. I had never felt anything like it before. In a burst of self-preservation, I desperately hoped I never felt anything like it again.

There was something incredibly disorienting about waking up in extreme pain with no recollection of how I got that way. Slowly the memory returned and the panic started to fill my chest. I had been shot. The reality set in of what that meant. I had been shot and now I was somewhere strange with a gunshot wound. The throbbing pain in my side? That was the gunshot wound.

But I was alive. That felt like a small win.

I could hear murmurs down the hall, and I took