Chapter 15
Cassandra
Nails carving into the raw wood and chipped paint in front of me, I release another ear-splitting scream that seems to get trapped inside my tight confines and reverberate back into my soul.
It’s no use. He’s not in the house anymore, and the closest neighbors are a mile away.
Tears stream down my cheeks, and I throw all my weight into the door, the strong wood barely shaking from the impact.
I don’t know how long it’s been since he pushed me in here, but I’ve watched the light from the windows fall and rise again through the small crack at the hinge—the only patch of illumination in the stale darkness.
When Mom left for her business conference on Monday, I was already apprehensive about spending the week with Joe.
My relationship with my stepdad is anything but close, but never in a million years did I think he would get mad enough to lock me in a closet for days.
There’s no food in here, no water. I’ve never been so thirsty in my life.
A few hours ago, I managed to fall asleep for I don’t know how long, but the raw horror I felt waking up in here—locked in this pit and surrounded by darkness—was so terrifying that I’ve been doing everything possible to stay awake since.
Suddenly, I hear the familiar click of the front door. Maybe Mom came back? A sob catches in my throat as I scramble to my knees, banging my fist against the wood once more.
“Help!” I scream, the word morphing into another collection of sobs.
Then I hear footsteps nearing the closet. Hope soars in my chest as I scream louder, bang harder—
“Shut the fuck up, bitch!” My stepdad yells, smacking the other side of the door with a reverberating thud.
I gasp awake, my throat scratchy and raw as cool air shoots down. My pillow is damp from the tears that still cling to my cheeks.
Something pounds against the wall, convincing me that I’m still not entirely awake, until I hear the shrill, irritated voice accompanying it.
“Cass, shut up! I’m trying to sleep,” Veronica’s muffled voice sounds through the wall. I check the time, flinching when I see it’s only 3 AM. Groggily, I climb out from my sweaty sheets and pull on a sports bra.
I’ve never been successful at getting back to sleep after one of my nightmares, but thankfully, our university gym stays open 24/7—my favorite respite from the bad thoughts. I tiptoe to the bathroom and brush my teeth before grabbing my headphones and climbing behind the wheel of my car.
The dark, empty streets help pull me farther away from the painful memory. No stepdads, no closets, not a wooden door in sight. My heart twinges as the wash of relief reminds me that I left my mom behind in that horrible house with that sick man.
I couldn’t stay, though.
I called the police once. When I was too young to know better.
At twelve, I had naively assumed that the cops would take one look at my mom’s black eye, at the bruises on my own wrists, and they’d throw the monster head-first into the cop car in cuffs.
Instead, I was sent to my room while Joe explained my tendency to lie to the police.
It wasn’t until after they left that I was punished. I never made that mistake again.
I was only seventeen when that final straw was pulled, but I couldn’t spend another second coexisting with my tormentor, pretending like absolutely nothing had happened.
I spent the last year of my childhood couch surfing and struggling to finish high school, before running as far away for college as I could afford.
I pull up to the empty lot behind the gym, palming my phone and mace before locking my car behind me.
The lights never go off here—one of the traits I love the most. I unlock the door with my university ID and set down my stuff, mapping out my workout on my notes app.
Here, I can just turn off my brain and do my reps until my muscles exhaust themselves and my mind goes quiet.
Only about thirty minutes go by before I notice my phone buzzing incessantly on the ground, the sound barely registering through the roar of music filling my headphones. I set down my weights, wiping a bead of sweat from my brow.
On the screen, I’m shocked to find a list of missed calls, all from the exact same contact. Worried and deeply confused, I answer the current call vibrating across the phone and hold it to my ear.
“What’s wrong?” I say, nearly at the exact same time as his booming voice sounds over the line.
“Where the hell are you?” Mikhail asks, sharp and angry.
“What do you mean?” I question, still having difficulty registering the strange question at three in the damn morning.
“I know you aren’t home, so where the hell are you?” he repeats.
I freeze for a second, scanning the empty room. Fear crawls down my spine.
“I’m at the gym… how do you know that I’m not home?
” I say slowly, my voice coming out softer than I’d like.
I want to be big and scary and angry, but my words shrivel in the small, cold fear leaking out of my heart.
The silence that follows stalls my breath, each individual hair on my arm rising to attention.
“Why are you at the gym in the middle of the night, Cassandra? That’s not safe! Someone could have followed you or—”
“I’m a grown adult, Mikhail, and contrary to what happened that night at your club, I’m actually highly capable of taking care of myself. Now tell me exactly how you know I’m not home!”
A weighted silence settles over the line.
“That night you slept over. I was worried about you, so I shared your location with you when I gave you my contact.”
Well, now the anger is ready to come roaring out.
“That is a total invasion of my privacy, Mikhail!” I roar through the phone.
“I know, Menace, and I’m sorry. But I just kept thinking about it all happening again—you, somewhere in trouble without me to help.” He pauses. “I was worried about you.”
My feet weave me into a path of angry paces, even as a small, weak corner of my heart does a little jump at the thought of someone being worried about me. Wanting to protect me.
Jesus, can you tell I’m damaged?
“Why are you at the gym, Cassandra? It’s the middle of the night,” Mikhail says.
My fucking God, the audacity of this man and his endless questions.
“Nah uh. We are not just brushing past this. You don’t get to ask me incredibly invasive questions and track my location without me knowing. This is so fucked.” I rasp out, exasperated.
“Okay,” he says, simply. It infuriates me even more.
“And why are you the one who always gets to ask the questions? You tell me little to nothing about yourself, but you get to demand all of this information out of me?”
“Fine. What would you like to know?” he says in a flat tone.
I swear my brain short-circuits on the spot.
“What do you do for work?” I decided on.
Another fucking pause.
“I run businesses,” he responds calmly.
“Don’t play that shit with me, Mikhail. I remember how we met. Tell me what you do,” I say, more slowly this time.
He sighs on his end of the call.”I don’t think it’s best if we get into that right now.”
I laugh, callous and angry.
“For someone who stalks my location in the middle of the night and thinks he has the right to question me about it, you can’t even answer one fucking question.” I seethe, hissing out a breath.
“Cassandra—”
“Goodnight, Mikhail,” I reply, before ending the call. I slip my headphones back on and open up the privacy settings on my phone, shutting off all forms of location tracking.
I lift up my weights, my energy renewed with blazing anger.
Mikhail:
I’m sorry.
Mikhail:
I didn’t mean to hurt you
Mikhail:
I’ll do better. Please don’t shut me out.
I hunch over the breakfast table, pinching my tired eyes at the offending screen as I fume at my bowl of cereal.
I don’t know why I’m surprised. This man’s first words to me were a plea not to report him to the police.
I’ve always known his morality was skewed.
I heard the implication of what he did to the man who drugged me that night at the club, and I was fucked-up enough to feel grateful that the predator was eradicated.
I never stopped to consider his capabilities.
It’s partly my fault.
Since I was a kid, I’ve always had this fantasy that someone would walk in through our creaky, worn-down doorway and shoot my step-dad in the head.
I knew it was wrong. I knew it made me a monster. But I couldn’t help taking relief in the idea that our tormentor would be dead. When the yelling and crying got too loud, I would run to the garden and stare at the dirt, picking the perfect place to bury his corpse and feed the hungry worms.
In my fantasy, it was pragmatic. Easy. There was no blood, no gasps of torture from a dying man. He would be there, yelling and hitting and then, poof, into the garden he went.
I’ve never shared the morose desire with anyone else because it wasn’t real. That’s not how men die. And part of me is aware that Mikhail knows exactly how men die. Orchestrates it.
And that buried desire might be why I’ve made certain allowances for his lethal history.
But if someone is willing to do something like that, it should come as no surprise that they’d cross other lines.
I double and triple check my phone’s privacy settings, but a string of fear still lines my stomach, and the more I pull on it, the more I wonder what other lines he has crossed. What he is capable of.
It doesn’t matter that he saved me that night. I need to sever the ties of this strange thing growing between us before it threatens to pull me under the waterline and drown me in its nefarious depths.