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He’d never set me free.
But I could never be with another man after him. The thought curdles my stomach.
I struggle to push these thoughts from my head. I’ve got to concentrate on survival. There’s no point in using up mental energy worrying about a future I may not live to see.
A vicious voice slices into me. “Rise and shine, you little whores. It’s another morning in hell.”
I start and stifle a shriek. I was drifting off into some dreamland of exhaustion, and I didn’t even hear Micah come in.
He walks over to me, his face blank of expression, and lets me up so I can use the toilet positioned at the far end of the room. There’s no privacy, just a toilet sitting out in the open. There’s a sink and a cart with towels on it next to the sink. I hunch over, trying to hide.
Micah stands there, impassive. I’m woozy from lack of sleep. My piercings are still sore and tender. And I know there will be another torture session today.
I can survive this. Joshua will find us, or I will take Micah out myself, or both.I repeat it to myself to keep myself from breaking down and panicking.
He hands me a bowl of scrambled eggs and chains my ankle to the bed, leaving my hands free so I can eat.
Then he repeats the process with Heather. I watch her. There’s no fight in her. She’s shrunken in on herself and she shuffles to the toilet and back without looking at me. She sits down on her bed and gulps down her food and hands Micah back the bowl and the spoon without a word. This is a familiar, terrible routine for her.
I wonder how much longer she’ll be able to hang in there. She’s so dazed and lifeless, anything could send her toppling over the edge into madness. And if Micah does succeed in killing me, what will he do to her then?
Micah flashes me a malicious smile. “I’ll be back in a bit. I’ve got to fetch something I’ll be using on you this morning. I won’t make you wait too long, though, Joshua misses you. He’ll need his daily video. Won’t this befun?”
I wait until he leaves before I return my attention to her. “Have you been here this whole time?” I ask her.
She twists around and looks at me with hollow eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says to me.
“What? Why would you be sorry?”
She sucks in a breath and lets out a slow sigh, and the seconds drag by so long I don’t think she’s going to answer me. When she speaks, her voice is cracked and husky.
“The last day I saw you, I snapped at you. And I never got a chance to explain myself. I have bipolar disorder. I don’t tell a lot of people, but sometimes I just get these flashes of rage.”
That makes a lot of sense. Part of what made Heather so fun was that she was so giddy, so whacky, always on a high. That’s not uncommon with people who are bipolar. The problem is that for all the highs, there are going to be lows too.
“It’s nothing,” I tell her. “We’ve other things to worry about.”
“Yeah, we do. I don’t expect we’ll make it out of here. We had some fun times, though, didn’t we?” She manages a sad smile.
“We did. We really did.”
She seems to revive a little as she talks. “Remember when we went to that bar, the one with live music and the band let us get up on the stage and sing with them?”
“Because you lied and said it was your birthday! We were terrible.” I manage a smile at the memory.
“Yeah, we were.” She smiles back. “Thanks for being my friend. I can be hard to deal with sometimes. I’d say that I’m glad to see you again, but given the circumstances…”
“Yeah.”
We both fall silent for a while.
I know there are cameras watching us and listening to us, so there’s no point asking her about anything that would help us escape.
My eyes are fluttering closed with exhaustion when the door flies open and Micah marches in. He looks completely different than he did a little while ago. His face is animated and his eyes spark with malice.
This is bad.
“Time to play,” he sings out. He’s carrying a long chain with a tiny clasp at the end. He hooks it to the hoop in my clitoris and gives it a little tug, making me cry out in pain.
