AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What did he do?! What the hell did that boy do? Is he dead? Did it crush him? We’ve never lost power before!” she shrieks each question like a dying black crow.
I feel a tremble from something hitting my cage. “If you so much as breathe too loudly, I’ll take this crossbow and blast your blonde head off!” Absinthe is scared. I’ve never heard her sound remotely afraid of anything. It fills me with even more hope. Please, let this be real.
“He’s dead, grandmother. He couldn’t have survived it. The purpose is for the walls to move so fast that a human won’t have enough time to even blink, much less think of a way out of it.” I can hear him try and convince himself of this certainty. But Dessin is no average human. He plans ahead, moves strategically, and is always the smartest man in the room. I have to believe that he knew those walls were going to be there just like he knew the acid sprinklers needed to be switched with water.
Since they can no longer see me, I relax my face again into a smile, and get a rush of pride when I see him do what he does best. It’s infinitely attractive.
Albatross grunts and suddenly he’s at the left side of my cage. Breathing hard against my face, smelling of cigarettes, herbs, and grass.
“Now, we can still finish this! We can still see the progress I hoped for! Do you know why I put you through all of this?” His slick voice is an urgent whisper in my ear.
“No,” I answer. “I have no idea why evil people do evil things.”
“It wasn’t evil! It was necessary! You were beaten. You were locked in a cage, a small, enclosed space. You had to sit in your own filth. You were force-fed. You were given ice baths.” He’s panting now. An ominous fear creeps inside of me. “This was all to trigger your childhood and your sister’s.”
My blood turns to acid. “What?” Memories of the basement, my father’s episodes, and Scarlett’s horrid stories pierce me. I’m stabbed from every direction. When she first told me about how she lived in a closet. She used the bathroom in the same place she slept. She was left alone for days. It was always dark. She would feel paralyzed with fear, and she would never fight back—because she was a child. Small. Helpless. I didn’t know about the force-feeding though, or the ice baths. She kept a lot to herself. Much like I’ve done.
“I was hoping being in her shoes would help you lower that mental block,” he adds thoughtfully. I want him to step away from my cage. I want him to drop dead and decompose.
“You made me relive Scarlett’s darkest years? So I would cry?! So I would break down for you?”
“Well, to put it in layman’s terms, yes. I wanted you to self-destruct in your anguish.”
I laugh. It’s edgy and hoarse. A rope of blinding anger wraps around my neck. It’s choking me with a desire to explode and murder. Scarlett’s experiences were so much worse than what he put me through. She was only a small child. And getting a small taste of that fills me with horror.
“How. Fucking. Dare. You!” Smoke might as well be steaming from my scalp.
“I’m trying to help you!” he argues, his hands shaking the cage.
“NO! You’re trying to get to Dessin! You’re trying to turn me against him!” The more I scream, the more my brain swells against my skull and throbs from the beating.
“Look around! He’s dead, dear! He couldn’t have survived that moving wall!” Herbs. So many herbs blowing into my face.
I pause. “…Then why do you sound so scared?”
And like clockwork, the lights come back on, a low whining of machinery powering up. Albatross is on his feet, jumping back to the monitors to find Dessin. Alive or dead. The spot that Dessin once stood is closed off by the walls that are now smooshed together. I try and scope the area to see if there was any way he could have escaped… but my eye is bloody and swollen, clouding my vision with red tears. What if Albatross was right? What if there was no way he could have survived that? My heart contracts in a desperate need to see his face again. Alive.
Albatross starts to laugh and shriek in excitement. “There’s blood!” He claps his hands together. “Look, there’s blood on the floor where his body was crushed between the walls. I told you he was dead!”
Absinthe looks back at me with an insidious smirk. “No one is coming for you, stupid girl. No one.”
No. He’s not dead. He would have thought this through. He would have planned for this thoroughly. I can’t believe that this would have stopped him. But what if it did? My heart sinks into a dreary place. Desperation. Hollowness.
“Let’s get out there and see how many soldiers we have left. We need to pull his body out in the open,” Absinthe instructs. “But you-know-who will be furious with us. We’ll have a lot of explaining to do to save our own necks.”
Who would she need to explain his death to?
Absinthe pushes a button next to the door and a waterfall of air decompresses, blasting Absinthe’s gray, stringy hair away from her shriveled face. Albatross walks around her and touches the door, his fingers curl around the handle. With the brute strength of an explosion, the steel door is blasted off of its hinges, flying across the room as if it were cocked into a cannon and fired. It takes Albatross’s frail body with it, his arms and legs flopping like earthworms being burned in the sun.
Absinthe and I both shriek in unison, looking back to the doorway.
A pair of legs hang from the ceiling just outside the door. The source of the blast that might have crushed Albatross under its weight. The body drops, his weight making the ground shake as his boots hit the floor. The dark hair, the brown leather jacket, and those fierce eyes like two nuclear weapons ready to devastate humanity.
It’s him. He’s alive.
Dessin.
Absinthe lifts her crossbow, points it at Dessin’s chest, and as her hand trembles, attempting to aim it, Dessin’s eyes slide to her. And it’s over. With a quick kick upward, the crossbow is knocked out of her brittle hands and snatched up by his. He tosses it into the hallway as he has no need for that kind of weapon. He wants to feel their death, their pain with his bare hands. The next steps he takes are like a tiger, heavy, masterful, the thief of life.
