Chapter 5 Violet
VIOLET
At dawn Elena comes back into her cell and sits on her mattress without looking at anyone. She's been gone all night this time.
Her clothes are torn at the shoulder. Her eyes are distant, relocated somewhere her body isn't. There's blood between her legs today. She doesn't look at it. She folds her hands in her lap and mouths her three words at the ceiling.
Respira. Ricorda. Resisti.
I mouth them with her through the fence. Neither of us speaks. There's nothing to say that wouldn't be smaller than what just happened to her, so I say nothing, and she doesn't ask me to.
I no longer count days in this place, focusing on the guards instead.
I've seen twelve distinct faces so far, working in pairs, rotating on a schedule Matt mapped out in the first few days.
Three shifts. The tall one with the scar takes mornings.
The short one who shot that woman handles afternoons with a thick-necked guy who never speaks.
Nights are looser, less predictable. Different faces. Different energy.
The night guards look at me more, which is a problem in itself. Somehow I've managed to coast through until now. Somehow I've managed to avoid the room.
When the day guards look, it's a bored assessment, more like inventory check, the way you'd glance at cargo to make sure it's still where you put it.
But the night guards look with appetite.
One of them, a wiry guy with a shaved head and a neck tattoo that creeps up behind his ear, stops in front of my section of fence every time he passes.
Doesn't say anything. Just stands there, his eyes tracing the length of me while I lie on the mattress pretending to be asleep.
Matt notices. He starts sleeping sitting up against the chain-link on his side when the night shift comes on, his back to the fence between us, positioned so anyone looking at me has to see him first. He doesn't mention it.
I don't mention it. We just adjust, the way you adjust to a building that's settling.
I'm tired. Not normal tired, not beaten-down-by-captivity tired, though there's plenty of that.
A different kind. Bone-deep, like my body is running something in the background that's eating all the processing power.
I sleep ten, twelve hours and wake up feeling like I haven't slept at all.
My chest aches in a dull, diffuse way I can't pin to any specific injury, the area around my breasts tender in a way that's been bothering me for days.
The water here is bad. Whatever they're giving us is doing something to my system.
Nausea hits without warning, worst in the mornings, and I've gotten good at breathing through it before it gets away from me.
But I'm surviving, trying my hardest to come up with an escape plan, and failing.
I don't know how long I've been here. Time blurs without sunlight, just an endless fluorescent hum and the distant cries that echo through the walls every night.
A week. Two. Maybe longer. It feels like forever.
I tell myself I'm lucky. The other women aren't. Their screams splinter the dark, raw and endless, bodies used and discarded as if they're nothing.
Beaten. Raped. Daily. But not me. Not yet.
"Your turn, American girl."
The voice rips me from shallow sleep. Two guards I haven't seen before stand outside the chain-link. One drags the barrel of his loaded gun along the links, metal scraping metal in slow, deliberate rhythm. The other unlocks my door with a heavy clank.
My body locks tight. I keep my eyes shut, breathing even, willing them to think I'm still out. Maybe they'll leave.
No chance.
A steel-toed boot slams into my shin. Pain lances up my leg, bright and vicious, and I groan before I can stop it.
"Hey!" Matt's voice cracks from the next cage. "Leave her alone!"
They don't even glance at him. Rough hands yank me up by my sleeve, the fabric tearing at the seam. I scramble, feet slipping on concrete, but the one with the gun drives a fist into my kidney. White-hot fire explodes through my side as my vision swims.
"We can do this the hard way," he says, voice flat, "or you can come like a good little American. Your choice. But just so you know, I like the hard way better."
I swallow bile and force my legs under me.
My whole body shakes, traitorous tremors I hate myself for showing.
Weak. Pathetic. I keep my eyes on their hands, tracking every twitch.
Matt whispers my name as they drag me past his fence.
I keep my gaze fixed on the guards, looking away from them would be suicide.
Mercifully they don't take me up the metal staircase.
The room I end up in is at the end of a corridor I haven't seen before.
Harsh overhead lights blind me, the kind that flatten everything and make you look like a corpse before you are one.
A metal chair waits in the center, bolted to the floor.
They shove me into it, the metal biting cold through my jeans and shirt, then tie my wrists and ankles, the knots pulled cruelly tight.
The first blow lands before I draw breath.
Knuckles smash my left cheekbone. My head snaps sideways as light fractures behind my eyes. Blood floods my mouth, hot and metallic, from where my teeth shred the inside of my cheek.
Don't scream.
The command slices through the haze, clear and ironclad. Don't scream. It's the only thing they can't take from me.
"Easy on the face," the lean one mutters to the other as he lines up the next punch. "He's particular about that. Wants her pretty when he gets her."
The second blow targets my ribs. Left side, just below my breast. Precise. Not wild. Calculated. They work me methodically. Ribs, stomach, back, thighs. Fists and boots in rotation. No rage in their faces. No sick enjoyment. Just a job. Specification met.
"She's been too comfortable," the gun one grunts between blows, driving a knee into my thigh. Pain radiates like shattered glass. "Two weeks no marks, no nothing. Boss says time to soften her up for training. Make her pliable before he claims what's his."
My teeth clamp so hard my jaw throbs. Air hisses through my nose in sharp bursts. Grunts escape, tight and strangled, involuntary sounds I choke down before they become anything more. I don't scream.
I count instead.
Seven.
Eleven.
Fifteen.
"Reserved for the big man," the lean one says casually as he slams another fist into my stomach. I fold inward as much as the ropes allow, bile rising. "Not for us grunts. No fucking, no fun. Just bruises. Softens the edges so she kneels nicely when he is ready."
I lose count at eighteen when he hammers my ribs again. Breath stops. Thought stops. My body hits its wall, lungs seizing, everything narrowing to bright, crushing pain. Black spots dance at the edges of my vision.
"Still quiet," the gun one notes, almost approving. He backhands my side, careful to avoid the face. "Good. He likes fighters at first. Gives him something to break."
Then it ends.
They step back, breathing steadily. Unhurried.
"Face has to stay clean next time, or boss will get angry."
Their words sink into me like ice water. Someone specific wants me. Untouched in the worst way. Unbroken. For now. Their boss.
They leave me tied to the chair. Long minutes stretch under the merciless lights. Swelling tightens my ribs with every shallow breath. Bruises bloom hot and deep. When they finally return, they untie me without a word. My legs barely hold as they make me walk.
I lead with my right side. Left is where the ribs are, and left is not an option right now.
My hand finds the corridor wall, and I use it, one palm flat against the concrete, moving in increments that probably look nothing like walking from the outside.
The guards don't rush me. Whatever I am to whoever reserved me, I'm worth delivering upright.
Coming back through the main floor, I see the others.
Some of them track me with their eyes, fully present, reading the damage on my face.
Those are the ones who've been here long enough to know how to watch without looking.
Others don't move at all. They sit or lie on their thin mattresses, here but not here, eyes open and glassy, fixed on nothing in the room.
Whatever they put in the water, or whatever cocktail of drugs they slip into the food, the air, the endless nothing of this place, it's eating them alive from the inside.
Hollowing out the fight until there's just a shell left, breathing, waiting.
"Vi. Hey." Matt's at the fence when I get into the cell, the door locking behind me with an ominous click.
I take my time walking over to the mattress, hissing from pain as I kneel down.
I can barely keep myself upright, so instead of fighting it, I place my palms down, then slowly move onto my side, curling around my damaged ribs.
Matt's on his knees in an instant, face pressed against the chain-link, hands gripping the metal so tight his knuckles have gone white.
"Vi."
"I'm okay."
"You're not okay, don't give me that. Where are you hurt?"
"Everywhere."
"Be specific."
A morbid rattle escapes me, my current version of a laugh. "Ribs. Stomach. Back. Cheek."
"Your arm. Vi, your arm."
There's a gash along my forearm I didn't even notice getting, the chair edge maybe, or the floor when I went down. The skin opened in a thin clean line that's bleeding more than it has any right to, given its size.
Matt is already tearing a strip off his shirt.
He folds it into a narrow band and threads it through a gap in the chain-link, then passes the tail through a lower gap so he can wind it around my forearm, working blind through the fence, his whole hand angled through the links to reach.
The chain-link presses diamond indentations into the side of his face as he works.