CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE PAST
I didn’t touch the book for the first two days.
I wouldn’t give him that.
Instead, I lay on the floor in a haze, slipping between shallow sleep and the gnawing agony of thirst. Every time I stirred, the chain clanked, reminding me that this wasn’t some nightmare—it was Oliver’s design.
I kept telling myself that if I resisted, he’d see how cruel this was. He’d come back, see me frail and trembling, and understand how wrong it was. He’d be horrified that whatever I had done to make him snap could never warrant this torture. He’d undo the lock and plead for my forgiveness.
Not that it would make a difference.
The moment he let me out of here, I was going to take Rowe, and we were going to run far, far away.
But when the door creaked open and I looked up at him through blurred vision, there was no compassion on his face. No hesitation. No shock at what he’d done.
Only an emptiness that rattled my bones.
“You haven’t opened it,” he said, his tone neutral.
He looked at the untouched book and the unlit oil lamp by my side as though they had betrayed him.
“You’ve wasted your time.”
I coughed, my voice rasping like dry paper. “Why are you doing this, Oliver?”
“You don’t think I’m being serious—”
“You can’t force me to do something—”
“You should want this.”
“You’ve chained me to the fucking floor!” I screamed. “You’ve gone fucking crazy, Oliver. Let me go now!”
But he wasn’t listening to me.
Why should he?
He had the upper hand. Why did I continue to behave like I had any kind of control? The threat of divorce wouldn’t stop him from leaving me chained in here, covered in my own piss, severely dehydrated and hungry.
For a moment, silence stretched between us.
Then his expression hardened.
He took the glass I’d been rationing, stared at the little water remaining inside, and turned it over.
The last of it dribbled onto the floor.
My heart jumped in shock.
“No more water,” he said softly. “Not until you learn to use what I give you.”
“No!”
My cracked voice broke around the word. Panic clawed at my chest. I pulled at the chain, thrashing until the metal split the skin around my ankle.
“Oliver, please!”
But he left.
The lock snapped shut behind him.
The next stretch of time blurred into pain.
My head pounded. I whimpered without meaning to. My own body betrayed me with its weakness. The hunger, the thirst, the suffocating dark—eventually, it all drove me to it.
The book.
I turned on the oil lamp and picked it up with shaking hands.
Seneca.
Nero’s teacher.
Even without knowing much about philosophy, I knew enough about the infamous Roman emperor who had supposedly fiddled while Rome burned.
Seneca’s letters stared back at me in ancient, cold print.
I wanted to fling the book across the room, but one lamp was already dead, and the one beside me would eventually dwindle. The darkness would swallow me whole.
My hands trembled as I forced myself to read the words of a dead philosopher.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”
I hated the words.
My vision blurred with tears, but I read them again and again because what else could I do?
I read his reflections on anger. On the pointlessness of wealth. On the chains men built for themselves. I went over the same passages until they were etched into my skull.
Was that Oliver’s goal?
To carve Seneca into me until I could no longer hear my own thoughts?
When the door opened again, I barely stirred.
I didn’t shout.
The lamp beside me had burned so low that I had curled against it for the last traces of light. My body felt brittle, my mind hollowed out.
Oliver crouched beside me, calm and collected.
“Tell me,” he said. “What have you learned?”
I closed my eyes, too tired to resist and too broken to scream. My lips parted, and the words came out hoarse and automatic.
“Time is not short…but we waste it. We waste too much of it.”
“And anger?” he prompted.
I swallowed, the ache in my throat making me wince.
“Seneca said…he said anger is temporary madness. To give in to it is to surrender all reason.”
“And suffering?”
His voice was soft. Coaxing.
My breath hitched.
“That to bear it nobly is to be free of it. That pain is not evil…only opinion makes it so.”
Oliver smiled faintly, as if pleased with a child’s recitation.
“Good,” he whispered, brushing damp hair away from my face. “You see? You’re learning. This is only the beginning. You’re starting to understand.”
He asked more questions.
I answered every one.
He continued to look satisfied. I wanted to scream that they were nothing but ancient words he had forced into me, but I couldn’t.
The fight had left me.
The chain was still around my ankle. Somehow, I had begun to feel it even when I wasn’t moving.
The defiant part of me wanted to tell him I didn’t believe a word I had read.
But the truth was, I didn’t know anymore.
The words rattled inside me like they belonged there. Sometimes, in the dark, I muttered them just to keep myself company. Sometimes, I caught myself thinking in Seneca’s voice.
Oliver tilted my face toward him, searching my eyes.
“Tell me, Daisy. Do you still think this is abuse?”
The room spun.
The answer should have been yes. I could feel it sitting behind my teeth.
Yes, this is torture.
You’re destroying me.
I hate you.
I will always fucking hate you.
But Seneca’s words came first.
Pain is only opinion.
Anger is madness.
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
My lips trembled.
“I…don’t know,” I whispered.
His smile widened, tender and cruel.
“That’s enough for today.”
When he left, the chain was still around my ankle and the book was still in my lap.
But what terrified me most wasn’t the prison of iron or the ache in my stomach.
It was that the words weren’t just in the book anymore.
They were inside me.