Page 7 of Contempt

Renzo blinked out of the memory, and knew exactly why it had been pulled forward in his mind and so quickly yanked him out of the present. The red lights surrounding him were far too bright. Even when Renzo closed his eyes, he was still seeing a shine of red behind his eyelids. It certainly wasn’t the blinking red light over the black door that changed his life that night, but it was the thing he remembered first before anything else.

Everything else was … difficult.

His gaze scanned the room he was currently in just because he could, and this was what he had been taught to do. Renzo knew better than to move, or make some kind of scene. It didn’t matter that he was mostly naked—in nothing but boxer-briefs—and standing on a raised platform of sorts while facing a wall of mirrors that weren’t mirrors at all. He knew they weren’t just mirrors—more like windows for the people behind them to watch him.

To appraise him.

The windows continued all the way around the room in sections of eight-feet wide by ten-feet tall. Except for one off to the left—another black door. The League loved their black doors. He always felt those black doors were a warning, of sorts. A way to tell people … you don’t belong here; do not pass.

Over each section of windows, a red light rested behind metal cages. For now, they were all lit up and unblinking. Just stark, red lights shining down on him. Overhead, far brighter, white lights gleamed down on his body. The heat from those lights was more than enough to keep him warm, but that didn’t mean he was fucking comfortable.

No, those were two entirely different things.

“Six feet, three inches,” came a distorted voice ringing throughout the room. Renzo didn’t know where in the hell the speakers were, but he stiffened in place as the voice continued on with listing his physical stats. Everything from the length of his arms, to the width of his shoulders. How much he could bench, the distance and speed at which he could run, and finally, they finished it off with, “One hundred ninety-two pounds.”

Renzo blinked.

How in the hell did they know his weight, and he didn’t even know that? Oh, sure, The fucking League certainly kept up with all of that when they brought him in twice a week to be weighed and checked over, but damn.

He maybe weighed one-seventy-five when he came to this damn place. That weight gain spoke to the intensity the last year had been for him. One year—that’s all it took from the time he stepped into the compound run by The League to the point he now stood here.

On a platform.

Being appraised.

Soon to be sold.

Like cattle.

• • •

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Renzo blinked awake with fuck as his only thought as the rattling overhead started up again. His warning that the chains attached to the harness that was connected to the straight jacket he wore was about to start lowering him.

Again.

Into that tank of water.

Again.

How long had he been in here again? This black room … it felt dead, he thought. Dead, and cold. No life, no light, and no sound. At least, not that he had ever seen.

The darkness and silence wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that it was just one of those things or the other. But when both of them were put together, it made a hell of a combination. It was enough to make a man’s mind play tricks on him. Renzo often thought he was seeing or hearing things that didn’t exist in the space. And it didn’t matter how much shouting and fighting he did, he was not getting out of that straight jacket.

Oh, sure, occasionally someone came in, pulled him down from the harness, and let him out of his restraints. He’d tried fighting back once—quickly learned that wasn’t going to change a thing. It was one person who came in, and the man beat the shit out of Renzo himself before putting him back in the straightjacket, and hooking him back up to the harness. He didn’t get to eat or relieve himself that day—or night; he didn’t even know what time it had been.

For the most part, Renzo was alone.

He thought … it had to be a few days, now. A few days he had been doing this same thing over and over and over—

He didn’t get to finish his thought before he was plunged into freezing cold water. If the rattling of the chains overhead hadn’t properly woken him up and reminded him of the hell that was his current life, the fucking water sure did it.

Because he couldn’t breathe.

He’d learned the first time the hoist let him fall into the water that as soon as he was dropped down, a cover on some kind of automatic arm flipped on the tank to close it up tight. Or as tight as it could get, anyway. Tight enough that he couldn’t open it.

Basically, he was dropped in the tank of water, the lid closed him in, and then for several minutes, he was under water with no way to breathe while being entirely bound by a straightjacket. He basically had no sense of what was up or down while he was in the tank because he couldn’t see anything. He was rarely able to get to the top where he might find a small pocket of air to breathe in, and he mostly just focused on trying to stay alive.