31. Claire
Chapter thirty-one
Claire
If my time with Remy taught me one thing, it’s that I am not a victim.
I feel like my body is too heavy, my lungs too full of the wrong stuff. The basement is cold, and it takes everything in me to stand, but I’m not going to lay here in a heap on the floor just waiting for him to come back for me.
He took my phone with him, so there’s no way to call anyone, but I’ve got an ace up my sleeve… or rather, in my bra.
I may be stupid enough to attempt to trust a stranger with helping me find Wes, but I am not stupid enough to believe that it was safe doing so. I was willing to take a calculated risk, I just miscalculated how awful that risk would be. My body can handle whatever abuse he plans to throw at me.
Even if my entire existence feels like it’s been shattered, I’m not willing to be his toy. When he gave me the phone, Dimitri had no idea that I’d be using it to get myself into this situation… but he was smart enough to give me the wireless tag and link his phone with it so that if I ever needed it, he could see where I was. I turned his access on right before I left the mall, and the push notification that he would have gotten should have alerted him that something was up. Considering that I haven’t answered the burner phone, he’ll likely already know that it’s not a fluke… that I need his help.
For a man who had made it sound as if technology bent to his will or something, he wasn’t smart enough to think of something as simple as a location tag. It’s kind of comical, actually, but I can’t get enough air into my lungs to laugh about it. I don’t know how close I was to dying strung up from the rafters, but it takes a long time to feel like I can breathe again… probably, in part, because of my broken nose.
When I’ve finally steadied myself enough to test the limits of the leash I’m on, I take slow steps, trying not to focus on how dark it is. I wish I could put my hands out in front of me to feel for something, but they’re somehow connected to the rest of what I can’t see overhead, so I can only take tentative steps, hoping he hasn’t got a bear trap or something down here. It’s crazy, but my brain is cycling through a million possibilities, trying to assess every detail of where I am, of what information I know. He gave me so much that I need to explore—I still don’t know who this man is. A random serial killer in fancy suits? A doctor who became obsessed with the girl who would be my mother?
My father?
But I can’t focus on any of that right now. I don’t know how long I have until he comes back, which means every second counts, so I push forward, one small step at a time until I feel the tug on my shoulders as I meet with resistance. The strain makes me cry out, but I stifle the sound by sinking my teeth into my lip and pushing harder, testing the limits of how far I can go.
Slick tied me up with rope before they left me on the filthy floor, and I spent the entire time working to free myself from it. And I managed to do it, breaking free to strangle Wes with it. Chain may be stronger than rope, but I freed myself once, and I can do it again. So, I strain forward, moving centimeters at a time and ignoring the tears that spring fresh in my eyes when the strain starts to feel like I’m being torn apart.
I don’t know how long I exhaust myself, straining forward only to be tugged back a fractional amount when the pain tears at my limbs and I feel like I’m ripping myself apart. The reminder that I’m a black hole is aptly timed when I feel like I’m being shredded into pieces. At last, I can’t hold on any longer, letting the resistance pull me back a few hard-won inches. When the tension eases, I tug at my wrists again, squinting through the darkness. If I could just see what the system looks like overhead, I could try to figure out how I’m wrapped up in it, and then I could figure out how to get out of it.
I know it isn’t anything as simple as the chain being thrown over a random beam, given that he’d somehow managed to automate the movement. That means it’s likely some sort of pulley system, whether manual or electric. Given that I’m attached at two points, it can’t be a single length of chain, so I decide to test that theory, walking backwards to the spot where he strung me up and then taking a few steps right, toward where I think he stood when I tried to rush him. The tools he’d had might be able to help me break free, so I move toward where I think they should be, though the darkness is disorienting and I can’t be sure it’s the right way, given that the chain at my neck begins to tighten.
Nothing catches against my feet as I push forward, suddenly aware that I lost a single shoe somewhere in my struggle. The cold floor is smooth, almost glossy feeling—and sadly, too slippery to gain any traction against. Frustration surges through me and comes out choked around the garrot I’ve fashioned myself.
I give up, the fight leaving me breathless as I let myself fall to the floor, too exhausted to try again. Instead, I press my face against the glassy tile, letting the feeling ground me. The anxiety rolling through my chest definitely won’t help me to breathe any easier, and despite the cold air, the chill feels good on my skin. My heart seizes in my chest, threatening to give it all up, and I suppress a defeated sob, anger mixing with the anxiety in me.
I never had a mother, an aunt, a sister, or a grandmother. My whole life has been shaped by men… their toy, their inconvenience, their pet to provide attention to when they want and then shut me away when they’re bored. Most of my foster parents hadn’t been bad, but even when I was in a home where I thought I may get to stay, it was always the men calling the shots, always the boys who were there longest and claimed seniority over the family pets, the spots at the table, the toys.
If I’m honest with myself, Eric Giante wasn’t the first to try to ruin me. He was just the first that succeeded. Before that, there were the kids who tried to trick me into strip Uno, who coerced me into giving up my sloppy first kiss under a scratchy blanket, or who threw me in the closet and refused to let me out while they told me stories about spiders crawling inside of me and demons coming to feed on me in the dark. On the occasions that they were caught, it would inevitably be explained away as “boys will be boys”, and I’d be expected to dry my tears and move on.
Whatever happens, whatever he does to me, this man will never own me. No matter what he takes, I will give him nothing.
When the final tear splashes against the floor, I lift my head up and decide to renew my fight. I’d rather be found dead dangling in his basement than give him the satisfaction of hearing me scream or watching me bleed, but I’m not giving up just yet.
The spot on the ground catches my attention as I stand, so I run the flat of my foot over it, feeling for any sort of interruption in the texture. There’s none, and when I move my toes over it slowly, it shrinks in size.
It’s a reflection, nothing more, but that means that there is light. And light means hope, so I spin, twisting the chains over my head to try and see behind me. But there’s only darkness there, uninterrupted and vast. I can’t see where it ends, can’t tell how big the basement is. I can’t remember from looking at the house whether there appeared to be windows at ground level, but if there are any, they’re covered completely.
I look up instead, squinting through the darkness for anything. When I find it, another quick burst of hope explodes inside my chest, but I can’t make out what it is. Not an escape route, not sunlight, but maybe the flashing of a security camera, recording this whole wicked show. My stomach clenches at the thought of not just what he could do to me, but what he could do with the film, of who could see it. If I die down here, will he release it? Will the people in my life see me in my final moments?
A current is threatening to rip me into the downwards spiral, so I fight it off, feeling through the darkness for my shoe. Once I get it, I kick it behind me, so when my clumsy fingers close around it, I can tear out the laces. It’s a shot in the dark, quite literally, and if I miss, I run the risk of losing my only weapon… not that I think I can do much with a single, dirty shoelace, but I suppose there’s a reason they take them from you in prison.
My first attempt to throw the shoe results in it smacking me in my own head, so I move forward, letting the chain tighten around my neck to get more leverage for my arms. The second attempt ends with my shoe falling to the ground without making any kind of noise alerting me of a connection, so I try again.
I’m on the twelfth try, with my second shoe since the first one ended up somewhere out of my range of motion, when I hear the first clunk of whatever I hit, and the second clunk of it landing right next to me. Inspired by my accuracy last time, I try again, getting a grip on the toe with one hand and bending over as far as I can to maximize the distance.
I don’t hear the sound of it hitting this time, because it’s immediately eclipsed by the loud, mechanical chirping that seems to come from whatever I just hit. An alarm of some sort. It beeps like some kind of countdown, and then all of a sudden, a shrill screaming sound comes from it, making it clear that the previous noise was just a prelude to this.
A smoke detector.
The thought flashes through my mind half a second before the sprinklers turn on. And then the whole room lights up with a strobing red light that cuts through the drops of water raining down on me.