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“Scars?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t ask questions. I was only supposed to be there, like an animal, like a piece of furniture in the room.”
The bricks are up to my eyes. My panicked voice echoes off them, throwing words back to my ears. I need to burrow, need to escape. But Trap only says, “You know more than you think you do. Start with the night you met them. Tell me what happened. Where were you? What did they say? What did they do?”
I don’t want him to know those nightmares. I don’t want him to think of those things every time he looks at me. I don’t want to ruin what we’ve built between us.
“Please…” he begs, quiet and desperate and unspeakably, unbearably kind.
So I tell him.
I tell him about dressing in a catsuit. I tell him about being struck by a cane. I tell him about the Crash and the chair and the olive oil cruet. I tell him about being used by three men at once.
And all he says is, “What else?”
I close my eyes and I harden my voice and I tell him about every visit after that first one. I remember details I thought I’d stored away forever, each jagged memory a separate uranium rod encased in glass.
And every single sentence adds to the wall around me. Every last word makes my throat grow tighter. Every separate syllable shrinks me, erases me, imprisons me.
I’m no longer Alix Key. I’m not a woman in a bed with a man she trusts to love her. I’m not a survivor, a person who was kidnapped, who killed her tormentor, who found a way to live again.
I’m a column of brick. A featureless wall. A blank, empty stretch of nothing.
Because nothing I’ve said matters. Nothing I’ve said will help.
I’ve given Trap words. But I don’t know any secrets. I don’t know any special hideaways, any private clubs where Trap can take them unaware.
Trap can’t save me.
He can’t save himself.
Jonas and Ansel Herzog will break us, the same way they broke me in their brother’s haunted mansion. But Trap knows all my horrors now. And there’s nothing I can say, nothing I can do, nothing that will ever make me safe again.
16
TRAP
* * *
Iturn off the light on my nightstand and sit in the dark, waiting for Alix’s breathing to slow. That’s the only way I’ll know she’s actually asleep.
She closed her eyes half an hour ago, when she was only halfway through answering my questions. Her face went flat fifteen minutes after that, all expression washed away by the horrors I forced her to recall. Her voice wound down as she spoke, softer and softer until I could barely make out her whisper by the time she was done.
She was a wind-up toy, spinning down to perfect stillness. She was an old-fashioned flashlight, the kind I hid beneath the covers when I was a kid, draining batteries to absolute zero as monsters oozed from beneath my bed.
I’d actually pay a billion dollars, if I could transform her stories into a child’s harmless imagination. But no child should ever know about the cruelty Alix survived. No woman, either.
When I asked her for the truth, I thought I was playing a chess match against the Herzogs. I needed to place my pieces. I needed to understand their opening gambit so I could structure my defense, so I could drive them toward the inevitable checkmate.
Now, I don’t care about rules. I don’t care about what’s legal and what’s not. What’s fair and what isn’t.
I’m going to annihilate those cocksuckers.
I want to do it slowly. Make them suffer. Take their money. Carve away their humanity, step by tortured step, the same way they broke Alix down to her component parts.
At least she’s sleeping now, breaths slow and easy for the first time since I forced her back to the past. I ease away from her side, guiding her head down to a pillow. She stirs, starts to murmur, but I whisper close to her ear, “You’re safe, Princess. Go back to sleep.”
I pull the sheet up to her shoulders. I tuck the blanket close to her side. I stand beside the bed, watching, waiting until she drifts away again.
