14. Chapter 14
14
HER
F or the second time in as many days, I woke alone, in terror, in darkness. Woke to find him gone. But this time, there was no chance he would appear at my bedside, amid the scent of flowering vines and smoke and starlight, coaxing my eyes up to the stars with boyish excitement. There was no chance he was seeing the stars wherever he was now. There was a good chance he never would again. This time, time was up.
But I wasn’t alone. There was a hand on my back, a voice in my ear, humming.
The last thing I remembered was screaming at my father over sirens and the neon blur of ambulance lights. Saying something, anything , to explain the situation. But I’d been shaking, disoriented, barely coherent, and I knew it hadn’t worked. He was already gone. My father had sent him away first , to get him as far away from me as possible. And then the housekeeper had put a blanket over me and hustled me inside, all while my father’s eyes bored into me with sheer disgust—a look I’d never received from him before, and one that made it clear that shutting up and following the older woman was my one and only option.
I’d been useless and incompetent, in other words. Like so many times before.
Upstairs, I stood catatonically in the shower for twenty minutes, thinking almost literally nothing, until the housekeeper came in again to tell me to turn it off and get into bed. She slipped a T-shirt over my head and handed me hot cocoa, tea, and soup as if tricking me into believing any of those things could possibly help this nightmare. My whole body felt wrung out and squeezed dry, the red marks on my arms and breasts still lingering nastily against the white. And that was the point. Corey had come for one and only one purpose: to make me a thing without agency, to be used as leverage, to be marked and manhandled and misused. Me and him. Because that’s what Corey genuinely believed we were. And whether he had lived or died, he’d proven it. He’d won.
And just as that thought crossed my mind, a hand was rubbing my back and a voice was humming a song with my name in it, one I hadn’t heard in a very long time.
“Mom?”
Yes. My mom sat on my bed in that aura of golden lamplight that always seemed to follow her, even when I was a child. It bounced off her expensive jewelry, reflected off the crystal stemware she always carried around, chiming like her laughter. Sure, as always, she was several martinis in, but this was a side of her I thought she’d buried for good, along with my brother’s love. And yet, wasn’t it strange when the very last people you expected to try, tried so hard ?
“Is he still as brave as you said?”
The question startled me, but my mother hadn’t indicated that she even knew who he was. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was pretending she didn’t. Maybe it didn’t matter because there was virtually no chance she would remember this conversation tomorrow.
So I stretched and leaned my aching limbs into her touch. “Braver.”
She nodded and kept humming.
I closed my eyes. When the sound of the door opening woke me again, my mother was gone, but the housekeeper had returned—not with water, soup, or cocoa, but with a silent, beckoning gesture. Without hesitation, I rose from the bed and followed.
HIM
In the weeks since I had arrived in the house, I had attempted numerous times to engage the old valet in conversation—half out of sincerity, half out of cynicism, knowing that when shit inevitably went down, it helped to have fellow slaves on my side, especially the ones at the top of the heap. But I’d given up quickly. The guy simply had no interest in engaging with anyone except his master. It was as if doing shit like picking out Louisa’s dad’s golf visor was the only thing that made him feel alive.
But that night, I found that maybe my efforts hadn’t been in vain. Because as the valet escorted me downstairs and into the windowless basement storage room I now occupied, he was gentle as he closed the metal cuffs around my wrists—new and shiny, like they lived most of the time in a drawer—and attached a short chain that he looped around the bottom of a metal shelf bolted to the wall behind me. There was nothing on the bottom of the shelf, but the top seemed to hold cardboard boxes and plastic tubs of odds and ends that were just barely visible in the light coming from the crack under the door. The old guy held a bottle of water to my mouth and let me guzzle half of it before leaving it behind to manage as best I could. There was more he could have done—like wash the blood off or give me some pain meds, you think?—but apparently, he was already on borrowed time, so he just shook his head and shut the door, switching off the light as he went. Which seemed cruel until I realized that the naked fluorescent bulb burning into my tender retinas all night would have been a kind of torture in and of itself.
Besides, what terrified me more was the way the valet had looked at me just before he pulled the string. Like he thought this was the last act of kindness I would ever get.
The chain was just long enough so that I could almost touch the bottom of the door, though not the handle. Meanwhile, blood from somewhere—my mouth? My eye? I wasn’t even sure of all the places Corey had managed to make me bleed—had leaked out to pool on the concrete beneath me, a wet, sticky, viscous mass soaking into my torn clothing, itself covered in dirt and broken bark. And my shoulder had gone rigid, even the slightest movement sending a horribly familiar searing pain down my entire arm and well into my torso. And with the addition of the metal on my wrists, the old wounds beneath it throbbed again as if the restraints had ignited the memories of the decade’s worth of scars they already bore. Ones that over the past few weeks, I’d almost managed to forget were there. Until Corey came along to make sure I never would.
If I’d been able to stand up or even move normally, I would have been rifling through the storage room for something to maybe pick the cuffs open with, followed by the lock on the door. It wasn’t as easy as it looked, but—usually with the help of idiots who hadn’t put them on correctly to begin with—I’d managed it a little more often than the average slave. Anyway, say what you would about the valet, he wasn’t dumb. And he knew what he was doing—the things were on solid.
But that instinct was exactly why I was now in chains, on the orders of the very man who had insisted, upon our first meeting, that I not be chained.
My master had finally figured me out.
There was no sound in that room, no ticking clock, no day, no night. The highlight was when what might have been a cockroach or a rat scrabbled in the corner, then hastily left. The room wasn’t freezing, but it wasn’t warm, either, and I spent what might have been all night and most of the next day huddled on the concrete floor. Occasionally, when I was lucky, drifting off for mere seconds before jerking awake, shivering in terror and renewed pain, possibly feverish now, remembering the reason why I was where I was. At first, I’d expected, if not Louisa, then her dad or someone to come, but now I was almost willing to consider the fact that they—her included—had forgotten about me.
If she had, well, congratulations, kid. Maybe she could still move on from this nightmare and have a real life. That was better than considering the alternative—that she was somewhere alone, crying, hurt in soul as much as in body, with no one to comfort her. And that was my only regret, really. Not what I’d done—I’d do it again in a second. The regret was that she might still need me, and I wasn’t there. It was the same regret I had about Maeve. The same regret I’d have for what remained of my life, it seemed. Either do nothing and watch as you lose the ones you care about the most, or fight back and lose them anyway, only more painfully for all of you. I should have learned it earlier.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered aloud to both of them. To my sister, to my mother. And then to her .
I’d failed to save them all, and the most shameful part of all was that if anyone should have been able to do it, it was me. Save for freedom, I’d had almost every advantage anyone could ask for. But what were all the gifts in the world if I couldn’t do the only thing that mattered?
And meanwhile, I’d die. Not in a mine, but here. Alone. Forgotten. Entombed alive in her own house.
Knowing that you fucked up her life as well.
Well, at least I had the mocking voices in my head to keep me company.
It was better that she didn’t come, I told myself, curling up into a tighter ball for the fiftieth time to delude myself that I could actually sleep like this, in pain, exacerbated by discomfort and grief.
Louisa had never seen me in chains. She didn’t seem to realize, innocent as she was, that it was practically my default state. But Corey, idiot that he was, did. He’d wanted Louisa to see me like this. He’d wanted her to see me for the animal, for the thing Corey desperately needed me to be so he could cling to the superiority he’d felt had been stolen from him.
So this was best. Hell, it was best that she forget about me completely. But if she decided to be stubborn enough to try to remember me, it was better as the real person we’d both found a way to pretend I was, for a while.
I didn’t really hope Corey was dead, but … fuck it, of course I did.
Anyway, dead or alive, it didn’t matter. The punishment would be the same.
I fell asleep shivering and woke up to a voice.