7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Larken
No. I don't. I can't trust him anymore. I didn't hear that conversation wrong. There's no way I could have misunderstood what's happening and now that I'm actually thinking about the situation, things are making a lot more sense to me.
The unwillingness to get me to a doctor.
Hiring a supposed nurse to make sure I'm taken care of during the day.
Keeping me so medicated that I have no idea what's really going on outside of this room.
Recording me when I'm not coherent.
Taking my phone.
Isolating me.
To be fair, the isolation started far before this. Now that I'm really forcing myself to look at it, the only person Adrian didn't innocently keep me from was my father. And he's gone now. I need to find my phone. And I'm not signing my name on another piece of paper until I get it. I won't be taking any more medication, either.
Wait.
The smoothies.
The drugs are in the smoothies. They're probably in any other food they bring me, including that damn soup. God, I'm so stupid. How has it taken this long for me to realize my situation and what they’ve been doing to me? It makes perfect sense. That's why I lose time and sleep so much after I eat anything. I have to eat and drink, but I need to find a way to avoid what they give me. A thought from one of my long-ago biology courses flashes through my head. A human can live eight to twenty-one days without food, on average, and up to a week without water, but closer to three days realistically. I can go a few days without food and I can get water from the tap in the bathroom. I've been able to go that distance on my own as long as I'm not too dizzy. Maybe a few days without the drugs in my system will help me get stable enough to find a phone and call Regan.
But what if this is just a paranoid delusion? What if I've finally lost it completely and this is just my brain trying to convince me that I'm in danger?
No. That can't be it. And even if this is a paranoid delusion, maybe it will force Adrian to take me to a hospital. Either way, I'm done. I won't allow this to happen to me any longer.
Anne brings in lunch a little while later. An egg salad sandwich and another smoothie.
“What kind of smoothie is that?” I ask as I watch her place the tray down on Adrian's side of the bed.
“Pineapple and banana.”
The creamy yellow sandwich filling is perfect for masking anything that might have been ground up and added to it, so would the smoothie. That's fine. I'm not going to eat it anyway. “I'll eat it in a little while. Thank you, Anne.”
“At least try the smoothie. I know you how like banana.”
I smile at her. “I'll try it later. I'm not very hungry right now.”
“Come on, Mrs. Nash. You barely had half of your breakfast smoothie. You must be hungry.”
“I'll eat when I'm hungry, Anne. Thank you.”
She glances up at the corner of the window and purses her lips, but she leaves the tray on the bed and goes back downstairs. I'm honestly surprised she let it go without a fight. I'm sure she'll tell Adrian all about it and whatever meal he puts together for me tonight will make up for whatever I didn't get during lunch. I wonder if he'll try to force me to eat. If he does, I'll just throw it up before whatever he puts in it starts affecting me.
It's Friday. He usually brings home take-out on Fridays, and a folder full of papers for me to sign before Monday. But I doubt he'll bring more since he brought a stack yesterday. Something else that's been bothering me is that no one from the office, none of the board members, have questioned the way things have been going. Surely at least one of them should be suspicious by now, even just a little. Maybe they have been and he swept their concern under the rug just like he's done with all my concerns.
Anne tries once more to convince me to eat the sandwich before she leaves in the evening. I refuse and she takes it back to the kitchen. I can almost imagine the conversation she and Adrian will have when she tells him I refused to eat. I'm sure he'll have plenty to say about it when he makes his way up to the bedroom.
I can't hear what they're saying but there is a significant amount of time between Adrian arriving home and Anne's car starting when she leaves. There's an even longer wait between the time she leaves and Adrian walking up the stairs with dinner.
And the brown folder.
I don't look at him when he walks through the door or the white plastic bag of take-out containers, just at the brown folder.
“Are you feeling well, Larken?” he asks, dropping the folder on the foot of the bed and bringing the food up to the night stand. He pulls out a burger and smiles down at me. “No onions.” Then he pulls out french fries and smiles again as he puts a Styrofoam cup with a striped straw sticking out of the top next to them. “And a vanilla milkshake. How’s that sound? Anne said you skipped lunch.”
“I didn't feel like eating egg salad. I'm not very hungry right now, either.”
One of his brows twitches. “Do you feel like you're coming down with anything?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I haven't been anywhere to catch anything. I'm just not very hungry. That's all.”
He draws a breath, his lips sliding into a flat smile. “You need to eat something. You'll lose your strength. We want you to get well again, don't we?”
I look up at him and nod. “We definitely do. I'll eat later. How was your day, Adrian? Is everything going well at the office?”
He glances down at the folder before he answers. “Well enough. Today was decent. No major catastrophes. I do have a few things for you to sign this weekend, though. Whenever you feel up to it.”
“The same ones from yesterday?”
“Yesterday?”
I blink at him. “Yes. Yesterday. I must have dozed off when I was reading over them. A payroll addition and a few other things. I wanted to ask about that. That seems like an awfully high starting wage for a lobby attendant.”
“Larken,” he sighs, slowly shaking his head. “I didn't bring you any papers to look over yesterday.”
“You did.”
“No, babe. I didn't. Maybe you dreamed it.”
I close my eyes for a moment, bringing up the memory of the paperwork that I very distinctly remember holding in my hands and reading with my own eyes. “Yes. Yes, Adrian. You did. His name is Roger Bellmont. And I didn't sign off on his payroll paperwork because the wage was closer to what an entry-level broker would make.”
“We don't have anyone at Vincent Solutions by that name.”
“We shouldn't, because I didn't sign the paperwork.”
He tilts his head to the side, his jaw jutting out, the tendons in his neck stretching so taught that they look strained. “I bring the folder home on Fridays, Larken. There isn't anyone by that name working at any position in the company. You imagined it, or hallucinated, or whatever.”
“Prove it.”
He stabs his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “Prove what?”
“Prove that there's no one working for me named Roger Bellmont.” I make sure to emphasize the word me, just to remind him who the company actually belongs to. I might be baiting him, but I don't feel foggy right now. I feel more like myself than I have in weeks, possibly months. He needs the reminder.
He laughs. “How? What am I going to do? Take you into the office? You're in no condition to be around anyone. What if you have an episode while you're there? They'd all know you're having problems and then what? How long do you think you'd be in charge of things then?”
“Indefinitely.” I meet his angry glare with one of my own. “If I'm not in charge of the company it gets parted out and any money made off of it goes directly to charity. Prove to me that Roger Bellmont isn't in our system, Adrian. I need you to do it.”
“Don't you trust me to look out for your best interests anymore, Larken? What happened to you? What happened to us? I've been working myself to the bone trying to keep Vincent Solutions afloat and now you're ready to throw it all away? Over what? Some crazy ass hallucination? Come on!”
“Just prove it to me, Adrian, and I'll let it go.” I look down at the folder, thinking for a moment. “It's an easy fix,” I smile. “Just give me my phone and I'll call Charla. She can confirm that there isn't a Roger Bellmont and then I can eat dinner and laugh about this.”
His jaw ticks. “You're not calling Charla after hours, Larken. It would be rude.”
“Nonsense.” I smile again. “I can call Charla anytime I want. I've called her at almost midnight before to ask for a recipe. Just get my phone so you can be right and I can relax.”
It's reasonable. Utterly reasonable. But he isn't going to bring me a phone. He can't. Because then it would be over, and he knows it.
“It'll only take a minute to call her, babe. Then everything will be alright.”
His jaw ticks again. “I'll see if I can get it to turn on.”
“Why wouldn't it turn on?”
“Because you've thrown it several times, Larken. Eat your dinner.” He snatches the folder off the foot of the bed and stalks out of the room.
I'm not eating the burger or anything else. And he isn't going to bring me a phone.
Adrian comes back the next morning with a frozen coffee, the folder, and a smile. “Morning, babe. Feeling better.”
“I feel fine.” I've been awake for a while and I am actually feeling fine. I am hungry, though. I took the burger into the bathroom last night to dissect it, hoping to feel safe enough to eat it since it came from a restaurant, but I kept thinking about the milkshake and how easy it would have been for him to put something in it and I ended up tearing it into chunks and flushing it down the toilet. I pretended to be asleep when Adrian came in to check on me and now it's morning and I really am hungry. I don't care, I can be hungry for a few days. Hungry and clear-headed is better than fed, drugged, and manipulated, possibly to death.
“I brought you a coffee.” He hands me the glass instead of putting it on the nightstand. “I also have a few things for you to take a look at.”
“I see that.” I bring the straw to my lips and pretend to take a sip, swallowing and licking my lips afterward to make it more believable.
He hands me the folder when I reach for it and I obediently open it up. There's nothing major to see this time, no bogus payroll additions or ridiculous contracts. How much garbage have I been tricked into signing over the past months? I have to get out of here so I can get a handle on things again.
Oh my god.
I'll have to fire Adrian.
No. I'll have to divorce him. Then have him charged with every single thing my lawyers can think of to charge him with. Does this qualify as corporate espionage? I don't know, but he's out as soon as I can get out of this house. “Did you get my phone to turn on?”
He sighs and sits down on the bed beside my knees. “No.”
“Then let me use yours.”
“Why, Larken? Do you need to be right so badly that you'll make fools out of both of us on a Saturday morning?”
“Don't you want me to trust that you have my best interests at heart? And the best interests of my company? I appreciate all the work you've done since I've been unwell, but I'm feeling better now than I have in months and I'll be able to take that pressure off of you. I've missed working and it's only understandable that I would want to take stock of everything that's been happening now that I'm not losing time anymore.”
His brow ticks, but he smiles. “I'll text Charla and ask her to call me when she gets up, then you can talk to her.”
I return his smile and continue flipping through the papers in the folder. “Thank you.” The last thing in the folder is an invoice for office supplies. A very expensive invoice. There is no way in the entire universe that Vincent Solutions needs that much printer ink and paper clips. How much money has he been pulling from the company with this nonsense? And no one is suspicious? I find that hard to believe, but maybe they wouldn't be if I'm signing off on everything. Does this count as extortion? I wouldn't have signed off on anything like this if I wasn't threatened or tricked into it.
“How's the coffee?” he asks. “Is it too sweet? Sometimes I can't get the syrup right.”
“It's fine.”
“You're not drinking it.”
I look up at him. “Am I supposed to chug it?”
He laughs. “No, I suppose not. What do you want to do today?”
I close the folder and hold his gaze. “Have a visit with Regan, I miss her. Will you text her for me, too?”
He pokes at the corner of his mouth with his tongue, taking a deep breath. “I thought you didn't want to see Regan anymore?”
I laugh. No, he's not going to gaslight me into believing that I would ever not want to see Regan. “Of course I want to see Regan. Why in the world would I not want to see her?”
“She kept calling and calling and you said it bothered you, so I told her to leave you alone.”
I stop laughing, the smile dropping from my face. “And she listened to you?”
“Well, yes,” he says. “I'm your husband. I know what's best for you. She was harassing you and you wanted to be left alone, so I made sure you got what you wanted.”
“Call her, Adrian. Now.” I don't believe for a moment that Regan would just accept that I didn't want to talk to or see her, no matter who said it.
“I'm not doing that,” he sighs. “It's been so long since then. There's no reason to ruin the weekend with all these dramatics.”
“I'm not being dramatic. I'm trying to get my life back in order. Regan is my best friend. She's the only family I have left. I won't lose her.”
He abruptly stands, throwing his arms out wide. “Am I not your family? We're married. That should count for something.”
“It certainly should. I'm asking you to do something very small for me. It's just a phone call.”
He crosses his arms and stares down at me. It's almost a glare. “After you finish your coffee and have some breakfast.”
I shake my head, sighing. “I'm an adult, Adrian. And as you said, we're married. You don't get to control what I eat or drink or when I do it, and you don't get to control whether or not I talk to the people I want to talk to. I have been unwell, but I'm going to be just fine very soon.”
“Haven't I been taking good enough care of you? I'd think you'd be a little grateful.”
I blink at him. “I'd be grateful if you reached into your pocket and handed me your phone so I can call my friend.”
He takes a snarling breath and leaves the room.
Adrian doesn't come back into the bedroom until Sunday evening. It's the longest I've gone without seeing him since we've been married. I only left the bedroom long enough to go to the bathroom and I didn't venture downstairs. I was worried what I would or wouldn't find once I got down there. The past few days of not taking any medication have dramatically improved my stability, further solidifying my fear that they've been drugging me this whole time. I am hungry, though. Days without food have made me a different kind of shaky. I need to get out of here.
Adrian doesn't come fully into the room. He leans against the door frame with his arms crossed and watches me for a minute before he says anything. “I've tried, Larken. I really have. I wanted to make things easier for you.”
“What things, Adrian?”
“Everything. You were consumed by your grief. You couldn't function even at home. I took on so many additional responsibilities to keep both of us afloat, not to mention everything I've done to keep your father's company from running into the ground in your absence.”
I blink at him. I would have been fine. I did have a difficult time with my father's death, but I would have pulled myself together after a couple of weeks if he hadn't interfered. If he hadn't started drugging me and keeping me asleep or unstable. He did that. And now he wants to pretend he's been some kind of savior?
When I don't respond, he continues. “I hired a nurse to care for you when you couldn't take care of yourself and you have behaved like nothing short of a difficult child in regard to her. You have rescheduled or refused every medical appointment I have made for you. You demand the use of a phone but then try to destroy it when I give it to you. You beg to see your friend but turn her away when I invite her over. I don't know what else I'm supposed to do for you.”
It takes every drop of self-control I possess, but I don't argue with him. Every fiber of my being is screaming at me to tell him that he's the one who created this situation. That he's the one perpetuating this hell. That he's the one who broke me and now he's trying to take everything from me. My company. My freedom. My sanity. He's trying to destroy me. But I don't say any of that. He would only brush it off or pretend like I'm attacking him with some kind of unhinged accusations. He would pretend to be the victim in this situation. I won't allow that. I'm not confused anymore.
He sighs heavily, looking up at the ceiling as if he's the one who needs to gather his patience or collect himself. “Do you want dinner? I made a chicken casserole.”
“No, thank you. I'm not very hungry.”
He runs his tongue across his teeth and tilts his head. “So you're just not eating?”
“I'll eat when I'm hungry.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Suit yourself.” Then he shrugs off of the door frame and disappears back down the hall.
He doesn't come back again, which is surprising because he had a whole folder full of things for me to sign just a couple of days ago. I can't say that I'm not curious about what was in the folder, but when I finally fall asleep in the early-morning hours the folder isn't what I'm thinking about. My last thoughts before sleep were cycling through the menu at Delgado's and where my phone might be hidden.
It feels like I've only just fallen asleep when I'm dragged out of bed by my ankles. The back of my head hits the low footboard on the bed frame then the floor. It's still pitch-black in the room and I can't see anything, but that doesn't stop me from trying. Just when my eyes start to focus on the dark shape of the person gripping my ankles, a piece of bunched cloth is pushed into my mouth and something is shoved over my head. I didn't even have time to scream and now I'm being carried down the stairs by my ankles and forearms. I can already feel the bruises beginning to form.
The shock wears off before we get to the bottom of the stairs and I start thrashing, kicking my feet, jerking against the hands digging into my arms. I get one leg free and I kick out, my foot connecting solidly with what feels like a thigh as the impact jolts up my leg.
“Drop her,” a rough voice grits, but only the person holding my arms lets me fall to the floor, my upper body hitting the stairs with a thud. Then I'm lifted and thrown over a shoulder and my breath whooshes out of me.
“Don't fight,” a different voice rasps. “You'll get hurt if you fight.”
“Let her fight,” the first voice laughs. He's the one carrying me down the rest of the stairs. “It'll be more fun if she does.” He swats my thigh twice. “She's probably going to get hurt anyways. They always do.”
“Let's just go before the nurse gets here. Hurry up.”
I do not stop fighting. I keep kicking my feet and screaming as much as I'm able to around the cloth, pounding my fists against whatever I can reach. I won't let myself be taken without a fight. I stop hitting and start scratching, reaching around the man's torso to dig my nails into his side, raking them across his skin, trying to inflict as much damage as possible.
“Get her hands,” he hisses. Both of my wrists are snatched and bound together as they continue carrying me through my house and right out the front door. I guess they're not worried about Mr. Lawrence being outside walking his nine-hundred year-old Pomeranian before the sun is up.
We stop moving and they put me on the ground long enough to secure my wrists together. I lift my foot to kick again but one of them scoops me back up and I hear the unmistakable sound of a car trunk being opened. I start shaking my head and fighting against the man holding me. I don't like closed-in spaces. I can stand it for a few minutes if it isn't too tight of a fit, but I can't breathe if it's too tight or if I'm enclosed for too long. I could be crammed into a dark, musty trunk for who knows how long . That thought makes me fight harder and he almost drops me before he shoves me into the trunk.
They slam the lid shut before I have time to sit up or try to get out. Pure panic seizes me as I listen to them get into the car and nausea threatens to overwhelm the panic when the vehicle dips with their weight. The only thing stopping me from throwing up is the fact that there's a sack over my head and I don't want vomit all over my face and in my hair on top of everything else.
I need to calm myself so that I can think and the way to do that is to find small things to concentrate on until I can breathe easier. During all the screaming and fighting the cloth was pushed from my mouth and I can feel it damp against my jaw. The inside of this trunk smells mildly like mildew and motor oil, but floating above that is the scent of my own laundry detergent. It's too dark to see anything, but I can safely bet that the sack covering my head is one of my own pillowcases. I'm glad I didn't change into my usual tank top and shorts to sleep in, otherwise my skin would be in direct contact with whatever else has been all over the inside of this trunk. That thought isn't as comforting as I wanted it to be. How many people have been shoved into this trunk? How many bodies, or body parts, have been transported in here?
I force my attention away from this trunk's body count to focus on my wrists. What are they bound with? It isn't cloth. It feels almost like metal. No. Plastic. Thick plastic. My mind starts flicking through everything I can think of that could hold my wrists together this tightly without any give and finally figure it out. My Dad used zip ties for all kinds of things, including the water hose.
Remembering my Dad's water hose reminds me of his house. Oh God. What about his house? I cannot believe I haven't thought about it until now, I just assumed that it would be there waiting for me when my fog lifted. If Adrian tricked me into signing away Dad's house, the house I grew up in, I just might kill him. And now I'm stuck in this trunk, being driven away to wherever by whoever. I'm finally out of the house but I'm still a prisoner. I have to find out what happened to my Dad's house. I have to fix things with Vincent Solutions. I can't let this be the end of everything. I can't let Adrian get away with this.
My feet. My feet aren't bound together. If I can get myself into a position to jump out of the trunk when they inevitably open it, maybe I can run. If I can get away, I'll eventually get somewhere and find someone who can help me and then I'll go to the police. I'll tell them everything and then …Then Adrian will show them the videos he has of me acting crazy and the police won't believe me. I need to keep quiet, and I need to get to Regan. She'll help me. She's the only one who will believe me no matter what and she'll help me figure out what to do.