The silence builds until my ears ring from the loss of sound.
I change positions. I pace. I do my routine exercise to alleviate the tenderness in my back. I try not to take the other half of the pill. I fail and take it anyway. Then I take the second one. I try to sleep, and I try to count. I sip at the one water bottlehe left me. I hold my bladder, refusing to use the fucking bucket.
I do these things repeatedly. I change the order, doing them at random, trying to trigger something…achange.
How far is Grayson going to dispose of the car? An hour…a day…days? The silence grows thick and heavy, weighing on me in the dark. I’m becoming disoriented. My senses confused. With what’s left of the light, I try to see my hands. A cold wetness covers them—that same sensation I felt that day. I remember the thick red…how it coated my flesh, seeped into every crevice of my skin. Blood stains down to the bone.
Wiping my hands through my hair, I attempt to clean them. Get rid of the feeling. The image comes to me too clearly now. The girl in the mirror with blood-streaked hair and dirt-caked clothes. I throw the water bottle at the image, waiting to hear the glass shatter.
But the only sound to follow the thud of the bottle hitting the ground is the crash of thunder. I whip my head around. The light is gone.
“Damn this to hell.”
I jump and reach for the top bars. My fingers skim them, and I come down with a lancing pain to my back. Doubled over, I take in measured breaths, mentally steeling myself. Then I try again.
With a groan, I grab hold of the bars. My arms burn, but I cling and start to swing my legs. Building momentum, I rock back and forth, talking myself into it, before I slam my bare feet into the cell door.
Pain webs through my body. I hit the floor, breath knocked from my lungs. Acute nausea grips me before I can cry out, and I hurl myself onto my side. I try for the bucket, but it’s too far. I lose my stomach right here on the floor.
I wretch until my stomach is as empty as the room, and there’s nothing left but bile. Flames lick my throat, and Imentally curse myself for throwing the water. When I roll onto my back, the pain is a living, breathing demon within me. It rages, working its way to my shoulder blades. My breath saws in and out. I blink back tears against the sudden flickering that covers my vision.
The flashes intensify, and I can’t be sure if it’s from the pain or the storm. A roll of thunder booms in time with each flip of the light.Light and dark. My heart picks up the beat, my blood pulsing painfully in rhythm, syncing with the flickering. Like an 8mm film reel, scratchy images bleed through the haze of pain. My mind is losing the battle.
Rain hammers our tin roof. Theplinkscome faster, harder, creating a sonogram of vibrations against my eyelids. I try to drift away, but the storm outside won’t let me go. It reminds me that he’ll be home soon.
The creak of pines whispers from my past. Voices float through the thin branches to taunt me.You know.
I shake my head against the floor. The motion tips my body over a cliff, and I’m spiraling down, nowhere to land, nothing to catch me. “Stop.”
The creak grows louder. It’s no longer coming from the trees. I see his boots come down the steps, his weight bowing the boards. I hear theclinkof the key entering the lock, then the squeak of the door opening.
She’s panicking. Asking me what to do.What are we going to do?
I look to the girl beside me.“Be good girls.”
My eyes fly open with a start.
No. no, no, no.
I crawl away from the memory, toward that sliver of light. Where is it? God—where the fuck is it?
The fall jarred something inside me. One of the sealed doors came off the hinges.
I hear Sadie’s voice:once you break the locks, there’s no going back.
How far down does the rabbit hole go?
It’s Grayson’s voice guiding me toward that light now as my fingers claw the floor. Each push forward sends a fire-hot whip of pain across my spinal cord. I absorb the lashes, even welcome them, because the pain is real. I know it exists and why.
But the memories flooding my mind are streaming too fast. Overwhelming. My mind fractures, trying to separate truth from fiction.
He drugged me. Grayson had to have drugged me. I cling to that hope, desperate for the images assaulting my head to dissolve back into the abyss. But where there was once darkness, a light shines, illuminating those haunted corners.
I reach the bars and hold on tight as I tunnel down.
I’m not my father’s daughter.
Not by blood. Not by a nameless, faceless woman who died after I was born. That’s not her garden. That’s not ourhome. I was born the day he stole me. Brought me into his world of locks and keys and bars. I was born into a dark world—after I was ripped from the light.
