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Red had been down to see me six times, if my memory was to be trusted. This was the seventh time. Other women had come down here from time to time to ogle me, some men as well. But none of them had glommed onto my imagination like Red.
Red seemed… angelic.
Confusing, to see an angel down here in the bowels of hell. She was so beautiful. Face, eyes, body, voice. I was starved for it. A beautiful girl, sneaking down to my dungeon to chat with me? It sounded too good to be true. So it definitely was.
My sexy fallen angel was just a sneaky new attack on my defenses. Had to be.
But I was exhausted from keeping my defenses up. Besides, what was I defending? I was all fucked up. My mind was blank. There was nothing for her to find in there. So what harm could she do to me? Why not play along? What could it hurt?
Red’s visits had to be scripted, so even pretending to fall for it, just for the entertainment value, might give them an opening into my head somehow. I had no idea how, but in my reduced condition, Halliwell was definitely smarter than me.
Look at me, second-guessing myself, staring, salivating, sweating for her. If they meant to destabilize me, they had succeeded. And I wished she wouldn’t keep reminding me of my former name. I was trying really hard to forget it.
I had to forget everything. My family, all the knowledge I had worked to acquire in my life, even my baby girl. It all had to go, into the mist, into the smoke, to keep them safe, shielded. To deny that asshole access to my memories… and SmokeScreen.
Red was no angel, fallen or otherwise. She was just a new attempt to drill into my mind. I had to remember that at all times. Halliwell was like a strip-miner constantly using new angles, new methods for digging for traces of SmokeScreen, leaving a wasteland of poison and slag behind himself.
Yeah, that pretty much summed up my current state of being.
“Sorry to disturb you, but I can’t stay much longer, and I was hoping to talk to you,” she said.
“I’ve got nothing to say.” My response came out in a croak, thickened from scar tissue and long silence. And the screaming, from back in my time with Vincent and Nicole. I’d damaged something in my throat while they were breaking my bones.
I’d been sitting cross-legged on the cold tile floor for hours. No way to know how many. I couldn’t gauge time passing here. There was no natural light, and no regular light-and-dark cycle. The lights were always on. But I could tell from the stiffness in my muscles and the fullness in my bladder that it had been a long time.
I rose to my feet, sucking in a breath while numb muscles remembered that they existed. Blood pumped through the sore parts. Bones that had been broken ached and throbbed. A souvenir from Nicole and Vincent, from before Halliwell had “saved” me.
Halliwell had been at me ever since, but with different methods. He didn’t use whips, clubs, or stun rods, the tools that Nicole and Vincent had favored, but he was just as relentless in his own way. He’d tried all the old mind-fucking classics; the heavy-metal music blasting for days at a time, the sleep deprivation. When I was properly softened up, they strapped me onto a cot, hooked me up to a bunch of diagnostic machines, drugged the living shit out of me, and interrogated me for hours, while analyzing my reactions, left, right and sideways.
They measured everything. How fast my pupils dilated, my heart rate fluctuations, my sweat, my rate and depth of breathing. Every fucking physiological response I’d ever imagined, and a lot that I never even thought of.
But Red here… well, wow. She was stimulating a physiological reaction that they had not bothered to measure yet. And my response was off the fucking charts.
I gazed through the six-inch wall of reinforced glass, wondering how this could possibly play out. She was so fucking pretty, she practically hurt my eyes. So tall. Long and willowy and lithe. Haunted eyes ringed with thick sooty lashes. That full, sad, sexy mouth that rarely smiled. That wavy, glossy dark-red hair. Freckles on every part of her that I could see, making me wonder about all the parts that I couldn’t.
Just eye contact sent a tingling rush straight to my dick. As if she’d stroked me.
“I can’t stay much longer,” she said. “I brought you some fruit. I put it in the drawer. If you want it.”
Fruit? I went over to the drawer and pushed the button. The mechanism hummed as the shallow steel drawer slid on its rails to the other side of the massive titanium wall.
I slid open the box and gazed down at her offering. A paper bowl of berries, grapes, melon chunks. What were those red things? Currants? All those vitamins and antioxidants and polyphenols were wasted on a guy doomed to die under glass, but hey, it was a sweet thought, even if it was just a sinister plot to peel my brain open like a sardine can. Plus, I admired the way the light behind her lit up her hair, a fuzz of reddish light around her. “Thanks,” I croaked. “Looks nice.”
“My pleasure. Are you, um… okay?”
I shot her an eloquent look, turned, and went to take a long piss.
I was light years past being embarrassed about her watching me do it. For months, I’d had cameras trained on me while I slept, ate, exercised, showered, screamed obscenities, pounded walls. I didn’t concern myself anymore. Let ’em watch, the sick fucks.
And I had a shock collar around my neck. A relic of my time with Vincent. It was one of his hellish designs; capable of zapping me with electricity and also administering any injectable drugs loaded into the chambers. Plus, as a bonus, it featured a strand of strong wire that would tighten on command at the touch of a remote, to the point of slicing my jugular. Should anyone care to do that, at any time.
Back in the day, using the wire on me had gotten Vincent hard. He’d hook the collar to a chain dangling from the ceiling and drag me up off my feet with a pulley. I had to clutch the chain with both hands to keep it from garroting me, and Vincent would stand below, staring up, massaging his crotch as I struggled and swayed, blood pattering down. Fucking pervert. And Nicole had been even more depraved, if possible.
But Halliwell beat them all. He was smarter, more patient, and much more methodical. I’d been in a coma when he retrieved me from Nicole and Vincent, but Halliwell had kept the collar on, even after I woke up. A constant reminder that I was kept alive only by his sufferance. He got off on that.
No, I was not okay. But hey, it was tricky to think of non-triggering things to say to a half-naked guy in a shock collar rigged with garrote wire, trapped behind six inches of glass. She got points for trying.
The poison gas canister mounted up in the top corner didn’t help, either. A tap of a button and my cell would fill with death fog. Halliwell liked to remind me of that fact, when he came down to talk to me. He was just a barrel of laughs, that guy.
