Not a Good Plan
The burglars (to recap) are panicking, Cassandra is keeping relatively quiet but that’s because they’re keeping her head to the wall and being generally rather threatening. Now they’re about to leave and they need to make sure she stays quiet.
This is where things start to go terribly wrong. They come up with a plan to gag Cassandra by tying a pillow to her face. This they do, and turn to make their escape out the window. Unfortunately, the pillow is hopelessly ineffective, which is just as well as, had it been effective, it may also have proven fatal. Cassandra collapses to the ground the moment they stop holding her and her knees land in the broken glass that has been liberally scattered across the floor.
She screams as she suffers a hundred cuts on her knees, shins and feet. In the next room, her brother wakes up. He’s just been having a nightmare and it takes him a second to realise the screaming isn’t his best friend being tortured for not telling the dinner lady he wanted custard on his apple crumble. He grabs the knife that he’s taken to sleeping with under his pillow and runs to his sister’s room.
He opens the door just as one of the burglars has dragged Cassandra to her feet, while the other one is halfway out the window. He makes a move to grab the burglar who – having nothing at hand to counter this – does the only thing he can. He shoves Cassandra at her brother and dives for the window.
There’s a sickening moment as Cassandra’s brother realises that he’s trying to catch her with the wrong hand; everything seems to skip for a heartbeat; and then – like a DVD stuck on whatever that not-really-fast-forward mode is that’s just watching the film a shade faster with no sound – everything plays out exactly as everyone is afraid it would.
Cassandra’s parents are woken up by the horrible tortured noise of a young man who thinks he’s killed the only person in the entire world he really loves. They have dialled the emergency services before they’ve even reached their daughter’s bedroom door.
And two days later Cassandra wakes up in a brightly lit hospital bedroom, the only person in the room is her brother – sporting a fresh black eye, and a couple of broken ribs that he wouldn’t let the doctors look at until his sister woke up.