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Roach grabs her other arm and slices into it. She doesn't wince. She doesn’t take her eyes off Dante. Roach might as well not be in the room. He's clearly frustrated by her lack of acknowledgement, and as he goes to cut again, Dante stops him.
“No! She gets one there for every day those fuckers don’t come to find her, a reminder of how long it takes them to give a shit.”
“Fuck,” I spit at Dice. “That’s what those marks were on her forearm, a cut for every day we didn’t look for her.”
“Shit!” Dice scrubs his hands down his face. “I… Fuck… ”
“Come on, let's carry on!”
Roach unties her wrist from the chair and ties it around her neck so that her hand is on the back of her neck and her elbow is up in the air. He takes out a blow torch and starts heating up a cross-head screwdriver.
“I'm gonna ask you some questions, and every one you refuse to answer, you will be punished.”
Dante asks questions, and every time she refuses to answer, Roach pushes the hot screwdriver into the underside of her arm. She grits her teeth, and her face contorts, harsh breaths past her lips, but she doesn't give more than a grunt at the pain. She never answers a single question, and after he puts a neat row of holes in her arm, she passes out.
Dante throws a bucket of water over her, and she wakes with a start before sliding that mask firmly back over her face. “Okay, you won't answer questions about the MC. Let’s see what you have to say about The Armoury. Everything you refuse to answer, you lose a nail.” Roach comes back with some pliers and unties her hand. She yanks it from his grasp and manages to punch him in the face before he wrestles her arm back to the chair.
He removes every nail, finger and toe, and she still says nothing. “Fuck… she’s one tough-ass bitch.” I shake my head.
We watch footage after footage of Roach slicing her arm every day and asking questions and her ignoring them. We skip through all the stuff when she’s left alone and focus on what we can learn from Dante and Roach. She’s been there for days, and she hasn’t eaten. She sleeps and sits in that chair. They allow her a few sips of water throughout the day, but she just pisses and shits in that fucking chair. There's a hole in the seat and a bucket underneath, which Roach empties every day. Still, the smell must be horrific.
We skip through more torture, and it turns out it's Roach who gives Dante the location of our armoury. He was away at Carmen’s, so he didn’t know we had moved it when we met with The Armoury. In fact, everything Dante had on us comes from Roach. Ray never says a word other than to taunt them and ridicule Roach when he tries to rape her while Dante’s not there. She ends up with a beating instead, as with all her taunting, he just can’t get it up. Thank heavens for small mercies and all that. Even when he beats her, she just laughs at him till he gives up and storms out. As soon as he leaves, her demeanour changes. She sags against the chair, and tears roll down her face.
“I don’t think I can watch any more of this,” I say to Dice as I get up from the chair. “If I knew where Roach was, I'd go and do everything he did to her to him. I want to rip him and Dante apart.”
“Come on, let's take a break, get some sleep. We're only about halfway through, and I've got a feeling it's only gonna get worse.”
I crawl into bed in my old room. We've cleaned everything up from when Ray had her little tantrum, and now I'm sure that's all it was. She could have actually destroyed everything if she really wanted to.
I only manage a couple of hours of sleep at most. The images floating around inside my head are fucked up, to say the least, and needless to say, Steel will not be watching any of that footage.
I meet Dice back in the tech room, and Viking joins us. We trawl through day after day of footage of the same thing: Dante asking, Dante getting no response, Roach torturing, and Ray just barely having any reaction at all. She must be in fucking agony. She’s never been cleaned since that first day, other than when she passes out and they throw water over her. We can physically see her wasting away, but when Roach isn’t there, Dante starts to come in and clean her face and feed her some bread, almost like he’s playing good cop to Roach’s bad.
“Just say you'll join me, Ray.” He strokes his hand down her face. “We can rule the world together, you and me, like it was supposed to be all along. It was always supposed to be you and me.”
She smiles at him. She must have been there about two, maybe three weeks now. She leans into his hand and closes her eyes. “Fuck, is she giving up?” Viking asks, “Don't give in, Ray, please don't.”
“You always hated me, Bas!” Why the fuck would you want me to join you?”
“Wait… go the fuck back!” I spit, “Did she just call him… Bas?”
“Bas… as in Bas, her fucking brother?” Viking scratches his head.
“Fuck I think you’re right, here.” Dice plays it again. “Fucking Bas, that’s why it's always been Ray. He’s gone after her. He wants to destroy her relationships with everyone else. That’s why the video of Steel getting his dick sucked and setting him up in prison to fuck the doctor. He knew Ray wouldn’t stay after that, so she has no one but him. That’s why he turned us all against her, and we fucking let him.”
I shove out of my chair and punch a hole in the wall, putting my fist through the photo of Dante, who we now know is Bas, who's clearly not dead! “Do you think they knew he was still alive?” Viking stands, too, and starts pacing.
“Dane will have searched everything I did from the night she was taken. He would have seen the traffic cam footage, so yeah, they would have known the minute she was taken that it was him and he was alive.”
“Motherfuckers!” I start pacing, too. “That’s why she faked her death. She’s going to join him, bring him down from the inside. He has to believe she has no one else. He has to believe we’ve all given up on her. Fuck!”
“So what do we do now? What do we do to help?”
“I don’t think we can. Like Dane says, we need to not get involved. It will only make things worse. We need to stall Steel. If he knows she’s alive, he will rip this world apart, trying to find her. We can't let him know!”
“You want us to lie to our brother, to let him believe she took her own life rather than be with him. Are you really okay with that, Pres?” Viking shakes his head. “No, I can’t do that to Steel. He deserves to know she’s alive and what she’s doing!”
“What if we’re wrong, though? What if she is dead after all?”
