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“Why the hell didn’t you delete the emails? She was bound to find them.”
“I know, I know.”
Something in Orion pinged, something sharp. A recognition. A memory. She looked at the shoes of the doctor who spoke. The first, chastising one. They were so shiny the lights on the ceiling bounced off them. His pants had tight creases on the front of them and a Rolex glittered on his wrist. A familiar glitter. She saw his eyes then, pale blue, and the memory clutched her throat.
Laughter. Not happy. Something born in a cruel, depraved place. Chains clinking. The room is dark, and it reeks. Shadows come forth. She’s immobile, trapped. He shushes her like a child. That shadow, the glitter of a Rolex from his wrist. He tries to quiet her screams.
A piercing ding of an elevator jerked her from the memory. The nightmare.
Orion watched the doctors enter, her eyes fixed on the man with the pale blue eyes and the laugh that followed her to hell. She stared at his badge hard enough for her vision to blur. Her feet moved toward the elevator of their own accord.
She would’ve entered if not for the hand that grabbed her shoulder, pulling her back from the abyss.
She jumped at the contact. Unwelcome, always unwelcome. There was never going to be a point in her life when someone touched her, and she instantly relaxed into it. The first three seconds would always be dirty, painful, and nothing short of torture.
Her first instinct was to swing, to fight, even though she’d stopped doing that against them years ago. Even though she learned the hardest of ways that fighting got you nothing but more pain.
The hospital disappeared with the grip on her arm.
She was back in the room with the shadow.
The shadow who is a man.
The man who is a monster.
He has pale blue eyes and he wears a thick overcoat. He never bothers taking anything off. He simply unzips and takes his forty-dollar prize. Thing One had told her once, in a fit of rage, that that was the going rate for her agony. Forty fucking dollars.
Orion is on a bed.
It’s dirty. Stained. Some of those stains belong to her. Liquid that used to be hers, drawn by these men. Stolen by them.
Each of her legs is cuffed to a bedpost. Her hands are over her head. Sometimes they liked to let her fight. They enjoyed that. Others didn’t want to bother with the farce, they wanted to take, painfully and easily.
He is one of those.
Orion wants to squeeze her eyes closed until it’s over, dream of other places, other lives, but she keeps them open. A leftover from a stubbornness in her former life. Her former self. Her eyes stay open so she can remind herself this is no dream.
And that’s why she sees the badge tumble from the overcoat pocket and onto the bed. In slow motion because everything here is in slow motion.
Clark County Regional Hospital, Dr. Bob Collins, Oncology.
He snatches it up quickly. Quick for him, maybe, but not Orion. She cements the image in her mind. Even when he tries to beat it out of her.
The room was gone.
The stains, the smell.
There was only Maddox, or the man that Maddox was now. Hands held up, palms facing her. In surrender? Shock?
Those were the hands that went to her shoulder. Those hands were what yanked her back into the past. No, it was Dr. Collins.
“Sorry, Orion,” Maddox said, eyes wide and troubled. She scared him. What she had turned into.
Good.
“That one was going up,” he explained, nodding to the elevator. “We’re, uh, we’re going down.”
Orion nodded.
Down.
Made sense.
But she turned her gaze to the elevator. The doors as they closed.
Dr. Bob Collins. Oncology. It was him alright.
She was lost in this new world. Since the past ten years of her life had been about getting out, she never thought about what she’d do or how she’d feel if she ever did. But now she was out and she didn’t recognize anything going on around her. The small screens in everybody’s hands. The feel of all the lights on her, blinding her, exposing her. Even the stars in the sky, that she took in for the first time in ten years when Maddox and Eric rushed them into the back of the van, were foreign to her, like some distant dream she’d wake up from at any moment, her face once again using a concrete floor for a pillow.
She didn’t know where she was going.
But she knew where she had been, and she knew that the stain of her captivity wouldn’t be something she could just wash away, or talk away to some asshole with a psychiatry degree, or hide away in some distant part of herself, to never see the light of day again. No, these scars were permanent, tattooed on her soul, and she knew it then, for the first time, that her only salvation would lie in the destruction of those who robbed her of herself.
