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CHAPTER2
I spentanother few days like that. I was fairly certain they fed me once a day, so I began to establish how long I’d been locked up.
It had been over a week. More than seven days since I last had contact with Alexander, Rome, Luke, or Harlow. I missed all of them, though, and wondered if they had tried to find me at all. I’d been positive in the beginning, imagining them frantic with worry and desperate to find me.
But as the days went on and the darkness wrapped around me, tightening its grip on my thoughts, I began to give up hope. I gave into my despair and sunk low into the melancholy.
I imagined them above me at the Academy, going to classes and eating their big, rich, indulgent meals while laughing at me scrambling around in the Pit like an animal. I even got to the point that I could envision Alexander bragging about setting me up, having his father throw me down here just to get rid of me. Or for some sort of sport, a game for them.
Maybe they’d figured out that I was different now, that the accident had broken me and rattled something so loose that I would never be a good little girl. A proper Upper wife, vapid and content to spend my years sucking my husband’s dick and smiling as I applied my lipstick before greeting our guests.
Maybe they’d discarded me, Alexander already eyeing up some other girl. Grace, perhaps, with her long, elegant neck and perfect manners.
Or even Victoria, eager to please bitch queen V. She’d be dangerous enough to excite Alexander but obedient enough to keep the families happy, even with her Russian blood.
Perhaps that was the life Alexander had wanted for himself, and I was just a nuisance, something that could conveniently disappear into the void of the Pit.
Had he been behind the accident in the first place?
As I lay in the dark and let these thoughts snake their way around my head, tightening like a constrictor squeezing the life out of its prey, I could envision a time without me. An empty space in this world where I didn’t belong, where it felt natural to no longer have me occupy the air, the surface of the planet.
I didn’t belong. So by the time Matron Baker returned to investigate my mental state of mind and assess my complacency as a dutiful future Upper wife, I was broken.
I’m not ashamed to admit that they did it. They ground me down to the bare bones, exposed brain matter, and blood and guts. I was nothing in the cell, and there was nothing left.
“Good morning, Miss Avalon,” her voice pierced the bubble I carried around me. “Are you ready for your comeback?”
I was curled up on the cot with my back to the door. My eyes were closed, but I wasn’t sleeping. I’d been drifting, letting my mind float untethered and listlessly through the atmosphere.
When she spoke, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an auditory hallucination, so I didn’t respond.
Then the lights flicked on and blasted my eyeballs with nuclear fire. I winced and curled tighter, pressing my hands over them to block the pain.
“Answer me, or I’ll leave,” Matron Baker said in her stern, disdainful voice.
“Yes,” I replied, and the croak barely made it through my desert dry throat.
“Yes, what?” she prodded.
“I’m ready,” I replied.
And even as I lay there, a spark of defiance sprung into my head. I didn’t want to be subservient to anyone, let alone the likes of her. She was such an old bitch, and I could barely stand to respond to her without disgust dripping from my own voice. I held back my anger and let it simmer on the back burner while I played the good girl.
“Excellent. Then please stand up and look at me,” she said. The smug pleasure she carried in her tone was conveyed in her posture when I rolled over to drag myself to my shaking legs.
It took a couple of tries to heave my body off the cot, and when I was finally standing, I could barely hold it. I’d done so much crawling recently that my knees and hands felt calloused and toughened through overuse.
“Follow me,” Matron Baker snapped as she turned on her heel. The stiff fabric of her stiff dress whispered when she moved, a sibilant sound of judgment.
I could barely keep up, but somehow I did. I trailed behind her, and every time she turned back with a look of pure hatred painting her face, I moved faster. Her palatable disgust was sickening, and the moment we were out of the cell, I could smell the reek of stale sweat and unwashed flesh clinging to me.
I made myself sick, and I couldn’t imagine being around me at that time. I was appalled at the thought of running into anybody, as much as I wanted to see them. To find out if they cared that I was gone. To make a connection to this world again, find my place, and cling to reality before I was swept away.
“We are letting you take part in your weekly treatments because you’re going to suffer if you don’t receive them,” she said. “All that hard work Doctor Norris has been putting into you will go to waste. Mr. Remington would not approve of that. He is so hopeful you will make his son happy one day.”
“I already do make him happy,” I mumbled, but she didn’t hear me. I was lucky she didn’t. To be honest, if she had, I would dread the reaction. She held my future in her hands, my life was in the balance, and my entire existence was dependent upon her approval.
She slowed down as we reached a metal staircase, one of those winding ones like a double helix of DNA wrapping the mysteries of life up like a zipper. This one was keeping the mystery of the Academy in its treads, and I was sure of it as we ascended to the next floor, one step at a time.
