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And god help me, I can’t keep them closed.
Bite him.
I take the first bite of mac and cheese instead.
The flavor bursts over my tongue, lighting me up from head to toe. It’s better than silk against naked flesh. It’s better than expensive champagne. It’s better than an orgasm. It feels so fucking good going down. Damn it, I would sell him my soul for just one bite more.
He sits back.
“Look at that,” he comments, and even though I can’t see his mouth, I imagine it’s twisted into a cruel smirk. “You’re a slut for this, aren’t you?”
Spit at him. Bite him.
But now he’s lifting a french fry to my mouth andI can’t do it.I can only bite down through the perfectly crunchy surface and the steaming potato within. Were these made in animal fat? Oh my god, I think they were. These are not McDonald’s fries. I would fucking love McDonald’s fries right now.
The mashed potatoes bring tears to my eyes.
They’re whipped together with butter, with cream. Calories have a taste all their own, and it tastes like life. My chin drops down to my chest. Let me worship at the altar of this feast.
This food, this life—it fills me with rage.
I don’t want to live down here. I don’t want to repeat this torture over and over again. Send me back to the brink of death and finish it off.
I lift my head. Tense my shoulders. I wait.
Another bite is coming toward me. Macaroni and cheese. My flesh is fucking weak. My flesh wants it. But three bites of food have revived me enough to give me a flash of courage like a broken match.There’s still just enough left to strike.
It’s hard to lurch forward, tied to this fucking chair, but I do it. There’s a certain focus in the masked man’s eyes. He thinks I’m just a greedy bitch, trying to take a bite. And Iama greedy bitch. But there’s something I want more than a bite of the food.
My teeth sink down into the flesh of his latex glove-covered hand, in the tender webbing between his finger and thumb, and he grunts. The grunt turns into a howl that cuts off abruptly. Salty blood dots my lips, and I smile as he yanks his hand away. His blood tastes better than the food. It tastes like I’m fighting back.
I lick my blood-smeared lips, bracing as his other fist comes down in a flicker, out of the corner of my eye.
Pain blossoms in my thigh, a new pain, a scream that comes from my dry throat. I look down in horror at my exposed upper leg, at what he’s done to me now.
He stabbed me with the fork!
“Fuck you,” he says, pulling the sharp metal prongs back out of my flesh. I scream through gritted teeth, more from the surprise than anything else. Ithurts.
I hover on the line between pain and madness, willing myself to tip away from the pain. I’ll take mad any day. The man stands up, the bloodied fork clenched in his fist. He has a grip on my hair before I have time to think, pulling it, twisting it, forcing me to look down while he kicks over the containers of food and grinds his shoes into the piles on the floor.
He crouches down again, eyes close to mine. My heart races. It sprints away and blasts through the walls and finds a way out, into the sunlight.
But not me. Not fucking me. The happiness in our captor’s eyes still somehow shocks me.How could I be shocked by anything at this point?
“I’m going to leave you down here forever,” he spits into my ear.
Then the pressure on my hair is gone, and the only thing left of him is the echoes of his heavy footfalls. The slam of the door. The locks hitting home.One, two, three, four.
On the mattress, Rome breathes in and out.
CHAPTER NINE
AVERY
“Rome.” I whisper his name like a twisted prayer. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I can still taste the macaroni and cheese, but it’s turned into a bitter sludge at the back of my throat.
Rome is still asleep. It’s been hours. There are things you get used to when you’re locked in a room beneath...something. Beneath another building. There’s a faint, so faint, rhythm of footsteps above.Peopleare up there. I wonder if they’re moving around freely, or if there’s just another cell like this stacked on top of the one we’re in. Rome told me it looks like a normal house up there, albeit one on the wrong side of town, but who knows what secrets are stashed up there.
