“Are you sure you want to?” I stupidly said back. But he’d left the door ajar and I was thinking about escape and not what I was saying.
I never saw it coming, how could I? His gun was in the back of his pants. He pulled it out and shot me in the thigh.
I fell to the floor clutching my leg, blood seeping between my fingers. The sharp pain went right through my body and I rolled on the floor trying to stop myself from screaming and giving him the satisfaction.
“On the cot.”
“You shot me!” I’d been shot. Oh, God, I didn’t want to die. No matter where I was or what they did to me, I wanted to live.
He raised the gun. “And I will again if you don’t do as I say.”
I had no doubt he would. I also had no doubt that the situation I was in could be my last. I pressed my palm to my leg as I crawled to my feet then limped to the bed. He obviously didn’t want to kill me; he could’ve done that days ago.
“Hands above your head.”
Shit. I didn’t want to do it, especially when I saw the rope in his hands. But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of me begging. Never. I may have been the quiet geek in school, but I was also stubborn and determined.
But I wasn’t stupid and had to be careful what I said next time.
I screamed as the gun went off again. This time, he hit the cot and stuffing billowed out into the air beside my left leg.
Oh, God. Help me.
I gritted my teeth against the throbbing pain pulsing in my thigh and raised my arms above my head, fingers curling around the metal bar. He walked over, his steps quiet and slow, the opposite of what was happening inside me.
He stopped beside the bed and I glared at him, refusing to flinch under his stare. “I have a feeling we’re going to be here a while.”
“What are you going to do? Why are you doing this?”
He leaned over me and wrapped the coarse rope around my wrists then to the cot’s bedframe. The tiny hairs of the material cut into my skin and I sharply inhaled when he yanked and the rope tightened.
His eyes traveled the length of me, hesitated on my thigh as if assessing whether I was going to bleed to death or not. He crouched, elbows casually resting on the cot beside me.
This time I did flinch when he reached out and pushed my hair back from my face. Then he said in a low, calm voice, “My name is Jacob and I’m your worst nightmare.”Dust. That was what I’d become. A speck of dust, floating, falling, fading. Something to be wiped away with a swipe of a finger and disappear.
Physically I existed, but the remains of who I’d been had been erased. The fight to hold onto who I was slipped away. That five-year-old girl who told her teacher she was going to stop people all over the world from getting sick had vanished.
Day by day a layer of me was peeled away and I was left raw and exposed. I never thought I’d ever choose to die. But I did. I begged for death. Not to them, I wouldn’t give them that, but when I was alone in the darkness.
But I didn’t die. So I existed.
I survived. And within the speck of dust, I had a speck of hope.
Maybe that was how I survived. Because without hope, there was nothing.
I sat in the corner of my room, my legs to my chest, my palm on the floor as my fingers scratched slow and methodically back and forth on the cement. I no longer had a bed frame, just a thin ragged mattress on the floor. They took that away after I used it to try and get out of my cell.
The door opened and I didn’t look up, merely continued my rhythmic movement.
“Get up,” Alfonzo ordered. After two months of being here, I’d discovered his name. He was the one who handled me when I’d been kidnapped and brought here. He was also the second worst next to Jacob.
Alfonzo liked sex. Jacob liked pain.
I stood, kept my eyes on the floor and followed him out the door. He didn’t have to make certain I was behind him. He didn’t have to force me. He didn’t have to do anything because I wouldn’t disobey him.
Not anymore.
Alfonzo was my trainer so to speak. Jacob hurt me, terrified me, he made me submit. But Alfonzo… he humiliated me. He treated me like an object and after a while, I became an object. I was nothing more than an expendable item to give pleasure to him and I wore a collar around my neck to prove it.