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“Too bad you don’t care as much about her friend,” a pitiful excuse of a man says with a sleazy chuckle from his spot in the corner of the room. He pushes his heavy boot on the back of Hanna’s limp body, welts and cuts marring her once perfect skin.
A shudder rips through me, and I want to cry when Bartiste grips my core tighter with a sordid grin on his face before he slaps me harshly.
I would beg for my life, for Hanna’s life, I would beg him to stop hurting us, to stop touching us, to kill us, to take our money, to do anything other than what he’s been doing for however long he’s had us. But we’ve already done all that. All that and more. He doesn’t care about anything else but our slow punishment.
Grueling, never-ending punishment. All I can do is cry, hiss, and yell. Nothing more, nothing less… and even that’s getting old.
“Maybe I should start treating you the same. Shove my hard dick in that little slit of yours, and pull you apart as you bleed for me. But your greedy cunt might like it and we don’t want that. Do we?”
Bile rises in my throat, and I swallow when it threatens to reach the surface. His hand slides farther back and that vile grin spreads. “But this tight asshole is guaranteed to rip and bleed.”
An unfamiliar chill rushes through my body as his finger pushes against that ring of muscle and suddenly my knee connects with a soft part of him. The movement happens before my brain registers it, or the potential consequences. But somehow, I found that power in some newfound anger-fueled adrenaline.
“You bitch!” He grabs onto his middle, right above his dick I’m sorry I missed, and his other hand connects with my face so hard, I’m swinging as I dangle from the ceiling.
When he comes back into view, he hits me a second time, the whiplash so harsh I’m amazed my neck didn’t snap.
The third time, the world goes black.
* * *
No matter what happens, I’m coming for you… I’m coming for you… I’m coming…
That eerie voice echoes, and I wake up with a start. For a moment, for one excruciating moment, I thought it was real. But once more, only darkness fills my vision, no Ronan, no light, no hope.
Only a dream… a cruel memory.
“Are you okay?” Hanna’s strained voice sounds in the darkness.
She’s lying next to me. Shivering. But it’s not cold here.
“Yeah…” I lie.
I rise into a sitting position, resting my back against the concrete wall, then I grab onto her and pull her to me until her head rests on my lap. We’re both naked, but it stopped mattering a while ago. She wraps an arm around me and pulls the rest of her body until she’s nestled against mine, her shivering subsiding.
“They’re coming for us,” I tell her as I stroke her hair.
I don’t fully believe they’ll actually find us, but I want to give her something. She needs hope. These people have ripped the fight out of her after the second time they took her away and brought her back beaten, bleeding, and… broken. There was nothing we could do to stop the bleeding. It flowed freely between her legs until it eventually ended.
The guilt riddling me is indescribable. It should be me. I begged them not to take her. It earned me a brutal slap that sent me straight onto the floor. Still, they haven’t done that to me, haven’t raped me. Only her. Making me watch my best friend go through this, planting this seed in my mind and soul, is a whole other form of torture.
It’s a while until she talks again.
“If they don’t come in time…”
“They’ll be here soon,” I interrupt.
“You never were a good liar.”
For the first time since I’ve been here, I almost smile. She’s right.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? Your lie? I get it. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel, so we might as well make ourselves feel better.” She speaks those words so slowly, no energy left in her.
“No. For what they did to you, Hanna. You… and not me.”
She stiffens against me, but soon begins to soften. Relaxed or defeated?
