Chapter 8
Jolie–present day
My head buzzed. A pain formed beyond my closed eyes.
Maybe it was my brain vibrating off the walls of my skull.
My eyes weren’t ready to open. The bright daylight washed in from the open drapes, burning through my thin lids.
I listened to the noise in the room—a voice I remembered from my past, low and raspy and rhythmic. Woodrow’s voice.
He was a distance from me, pottering around in a room that gave his tone an echo. His tone always sounded different to Hell’s cold tone. But today he sounded different again. Panicked.
“Woodrow. . .?” I called out quietly through my state of semi-arousal. Too drained to put in more effort.
“I don’t know what to do.” Woodrow wasn’t talking to me.
“Calm down,” a voice spoke back, but I barely heard it. It was definitely a man, with his husky voice, all fuzzy and out of focus from the loudspeaker of a cell phone. “You’re okay. It’s okay, Woodrow.”
“I don’t feel okay. She’s not okay. He fucked up. I fucked up.”
I listened to the reverberation of what sounded like pill bottles falling over as the noise drifted in from the bathroom.
“Fuck!” the curse wandered from the same direction.
I listened harder, straining my ears to focus on the words.
“They don’t want to sleep. I’ve upped my dose, but I can’t put them to rest. He won’t rest, and he keeps waking up the little one. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can feel them trying to take over.”
Little one? My tired brain couldn’t comprehend what was going on inside it, never mind what went on inside Woodrow’s head.
“They come out when you’re struggling to deal. Relax, Woodrow.” The man on the phone’s husky voice was clearer this time. “Check your diary.”
“He hasn’t written much on the app. That wasn’t the agreement. He promised. He fucking promised. I’ve taken like a dozen anxiety pills.” Woodrow’s voice sounded muffled, like he was currently popping a dozen more, and waiting for them to dissolve on his tongue.
“That’s too many. You need to make yourself sick.”
“I can’t.” He whispered the next part, preventing me from hearing, “I can’t put her through something like that again.
Not yet. You can’t imagine what he’s done to her.
” He took a breath, before allowing his voice to regain its regular tone.
“She’s covered in bruises, and that’s not even the worst part. ”
“Where is she now?”
“In the bedroom, in some kind of fucking dog cage. Don’t ask me how he got that through the lobby.”
My head still hurt as my eyes blinked open, taking in my surroundings.
Discomfort wrapped around me like a blanket. But nothing kept me warm as my naked skin lay cold against a metal floor. My legs scrunched tightly to my chest, as the length of my entrapment allowed no stretching.
While my eyes were closed, for that brief second, I prayed Woodrow was lying, but he wasn’t; I was in a dog cage. A coded lock on the front.
I maneuvered, trying to sit up, but I did it too quickly, causing my head to spin faster.
The height of the enclosure wouldn’t allow me to sit upright, and I bumped the top of my head on the metal bars. My hair cushioned the blow. I slumped down, my hands rubbing at my cold arms.
The swelling around my knuckles had decreased slightly, and I could move my hand without the intense pain that was there yesterday, proving me wrong about thinking they were broken.
I sat, looking on with my neck bent to the right, and thought to myself, this is exactly how a dog looks at you when it wants you to take pity on it. An ugly dog.
I blinked away my thoughts, sifting through all the nonsense and awful memories in my head.
My fuzzy vision saw him in the distance—the boy I hadn’t seen in years—concealed by a leather-looking jacket and dark jeans.
I blinked him in, taking in what made him so different to Hell. The way he talked, the way he moved, the way he stood. Different, everything was different.
Both eyes locked on him—something that never ever happened. My left eye had been permanently hidden by a waft of thick hair for ten years. Hidden to hide the damage and the disorientated blurs I saw because of it.
I brought my fingers to my face. Slow and entranced. I felt my skin, my fingers traveling over the mottles and paths of abuse Woodrow’s hands created long ago.
I stared at those hands, watching them bat the air as he stressed.
My fingers journeyed higher, feeling for my grown-out fringe. And that was when I felt it. Or, the lack of it. . .
Supple and smooth, I was shaved to the scalp. The entire left side of my fringe lay fanned out in long strands on the floor.
I hadn’t noticed it at first. Hadn’t realized that a chunk of my hair stayed splayed on the floor when my head lifted.
My hands rushed, clutching at the fallen lengths.
And for the first time in so many years, I prayed. I prayed for this to all be a bad dream. I prayed to God above. . . but he didn’t answer.
“Oh, please. Please, no.” The whisper fell from my trembling lips, and I fell silent.
My heart raced, almost feeling like it was pounding at my ribs, giving me another beating as my hands began pounding the side of the cage.
I turned, hitting the opposite bars, hoping to find a weak spot that would have this contraption collapsing.
The metal shook, but the cage remained sturdy.
Giant footsteps brought him closer. His stare—though different to Hell’s ice-cold glare—froze me to the spot. My hands stopped moving. My head stopped careening.
“She’s awake. The drugs have worn off. Thank fuck, the drugs have worn off.” He spoke, the phone still held loosely in his shaking fingers.
“What have you done?” I questioned, as he bent to my level.
The man on the phone asked if I was okay, but I ignored him, and so did Woodrow as we just stared at each other with every emotion a human could feel.
“What have you done?” I asked again, my voice louder. “What the fuck have you done!” I screeched, scraping my throat on the sharp words I wanted to cut him with.
I launched at the cage, struggling to get my skinny arm through so I could fucking strangle him. He jumped back, almost like he was startled.
“I hate you. I fucking hate you. I fucking hate you, so much! Let me out! LET ME THE FUCK OUT!”
I pulled my arm back inside, and I thrashed and kicked at the barred walls, but the cage barely humored me.
The light rattle of metal decreased as my depleting energy slipped away. I was too hungry, too weak, too fucking skinny to fight my confinement.
I was broken beyond fucking repair—but that was both a blessing and a curse. Because now, he could never hurt me more than he already had.
“Let me out!” I huffed again. My rage burning me, as I seethed full of hatred.
“Ollie, I’ll call you back.” Woodrow hung up the phone. He shuffled it into his jeans pocket before standing.
His hands rushed through his dark hair. Sweat beads formed on his pale face, along with lines brought by stress and tiredness. Well, at least he didn’t have to sleep in a fucking cage, right? I laughed at the irony, sounding more crazy than I felt.
And I couldn’t stop laughing.
Apparently, that was common during times of anguish, a reaction unable to be controlled. . . or, so I’d heard.
He stared at me like I’d lost my head.
The fucking cheek of it.
“Jolie,” he said my name but nothing more. The sympathy on his face was exactly what I craved yesterday, but that feeling had been put to bed.
I was done waiting. Waiting for him to continue. Waiting for the next punishment. Waiting for fucking death. I was ready. My time was now.
“Open the cage.”
“I need for you to calm down.”
“You need me to calm down?” I quizzed, as calm as possible.
As calm as a rifle ready to fire. “I am calm. But know when I get out of this cage, I will fight back. This time, I will fight back. And one of us will die, but either way, it will be the fucking end. And I hope it’s you.
I hope you die a cruel and painful fucking death, because that’s what you deserve!
” I was spitting as I screamed, crying as the words left my lips. I’d never voiced anything so hateful.
“You don’t mean those things.” He looked over. “So, don’t say them. They can’t be forgotten, only forgiven.”
“I do mean them. You’re a cancer to this world—a disease that needs to be blasted from my life. It would only take one good hit. And you’d be gone, and I’d be fucking free.”
He knew exactly what I meant. A painful blow to the throat for this to be over.
“You’ll never be free, Jolie.”
“No, you’re right. I’ll always be trapped. Always be tied to you by all the awful fucking memories. And that’s not even the worse part.”
I waited a minute, possibly two. Each one feeling closer to an hour as I sat playing with the hair that was no longer a part of me, moving it around on the dull gray floor.
Woodrow didn’t talk, either. He’d taken a seat at the edge of the bed, staring at the walls, wishing for them to close in on us.
“Do you want to know what the worst part is?” I looked over, my wet brown eyes dripping with sadness.
“The worst part, is the only way to survive you, is by loving you, despite how much I fucking hate you. And regardless of what you put me through, that won't fucking change. My broken mind always needed a little extra help dealing with trauma. A coping mechanism, you remember?” He knew of the daydreams, once upon a time, he’d pulled me from them.
“It’s no longer my dad taking me on trips we never got to go on.
It’s you! You’re the person who comforts me through all the pain you cause.
I still see the person I once thought you were.
He lives in my head every day. And because of that, my broken heart is still in love with him. A man who doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I’m right here, Jolie.” The pain plastered on his face would have crippled me if I’d seen it before seeing what he’d done to me.
Even after yesterday, after being raped, how he was feeling now would have still fucking hurt me.