AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I didn’t know what to do with myself after that, I just knew I didn’t want to leave her alone.
I took my boots off and lay down on the couch. If Rain had a problem with me staying over, I was more than sure he’d let me know and kick my ass out as soon as he got home.
I closed my eyes, but sleep did not come easily.
6
Fish You Out
Isobel
Cold.
Everything was so cold. My body shook with tiny convulsions, and I didn’t think I could remember a time when I hadn’t been freezing.
I didn’t know what warmth felt like anymore.
All I knew was the darkness and cold.
And the voices of the men who came down here to visit me. Calling them men, though, didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem fair. They weren’t men, they were monsters.
And they worked so hard to destroy me.
Everything they did, every careful word they said to tear me apart, and every mark they carved into my skin only to be healed later just so they could do it again and again was all in an effort to break me.
And for what? Sport?
I didn’t know, because they never told me, but the questions kept coming, and I always kept my mouth shut. Even if I knew the answers, I wouldn’t tell them. I kept my mouth shut because I was stubborn and stupid, and at some point I had become numb to the pain.
All I felt was the cold.
I was going to die down here in this hole. Death was coming for me, I just knew it.
Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part.
Did I want to die?
I didn’t want to search too deeply inside my soul to find the answer to that question. My mother would be so disappointed in me if she weren’t already dead.
I could hear her voice inside my head, the soft whispering of her ghost.
Be strong, my sweet Bella. That’s the only way a female witch can survive in this hideous world. I didn’t raise you to be weak.
She was right. I might have been coddled and spoiled and treated like a princess while growing up, but I’d always been taught to stand and fight for what I believed in. My fathers might have gone easy on me, but never my mother. She’d loved me and never shied away from showing me, but she also taught me how to be strong because she knew I would need that strength to get me through this world.
She’d been the strongest woman I had ever met in my life, and I can still hear her screams as she’d been raped and then beaten to death. I didn’t think it was something I’d ever be able to forget, no matter how hard I tried.
And there was a small part of me that never wanted to forget because I knew the memory would always help keep me fighting and strong. It would help me get back up on my feet no matter how many times I got knocked down.
The clang of metal alerted me to the fact that they’d come for me. I always heard the metal clanging of the ladder being lowered.
I never saw it, though, because the sick fucks had taken my eyesight from me. The return of my vision had been dangled in front of me so many times, and each time I’d turned it down. They wanted things for it that I wasn’t willing to give them.
They’d offered me my vision, clothes because being naked wasn’t fun, and food because starving wasn’t fun either. They offered to stop hurting me, but I was past the point of giving a shit about pain anymore, and I feared they knew it.
I barely even cried anymore, because what the fuck was the point?
“Why, child, you’re awake and appear to be waiting for us. You’re a sweet little thing underneath all that attitude, I just knew it.”
