CHAPTER 13 ELODIE
ELODIE
It doesn’t matter how much I kick and scream and hit, Caden’s grip on my hair doesn’t weaken, it only rips some out.
He stops once in a utility room with loads of drawers and cupboards and rifles through one drawer.
I take the opportunity to swing my fist around.
His other hand comes out of nowhere and grabs my wrist.
He yanks me close to his face. “Try that again,” he dares.
“Let me go and I will.”
His eyes gleam with temptation. “You definitely need a time out, little brat.” He releases my wrist to go back to the drawer.
I take another swing at him. This time, he rears his head back without so much as a glance in my direction.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he says, and takes something out that I can’t see.
His grip still firmly in my hair, he drags me back out and to a staircase. I thought we were on the bottom floor, but apparently, there’s a basement. There’s only one basement I’ve ever been in and it became my home for the majority of my life. Behind brick and steel.
“Are you going to walk down these stairs like a good girl, or do I drag you down like a dog?” Cade spits.
I glance downwards. So many steps that they descend into pitch-black.
The trepidation of what’s down those stairs has me scratching at his outstretched arm, still fisted in my scalp.
“Fine, your choice.” He proceeds down the stairs, and I’m twisted so much my feet don’t even find the first steps. I start tumbling.
“Fuck!” Cade yells as my weight falls and his fingers entangled in my hair pull taut, and he stumbles too.
We both fall down the stairs in a pile of thumps and cracks and gut-wrenching pain.
I don’t know how far down we get when I feel his arms come around my waist and I’m glued against his body, falling as one entity. Edges of countless steps crash and bash into every part of my body as we tumble down. Grunts are pulled from both of us as we spin and fall and thud.
One of his hands comes up to the back of my head and holds it to his chest. I land on top of him as he crashes to the floor with a sickening thump. A growl rumbles from him.
Adrenaline is pumping so thickly through my veins I can’t think of anything other than feeling for any broken bones. It felt like we fell down a hundred steps.
Everything hurts, throbs and pounds, but I can move all my limbs, my neck and head move fine. Only then do I try to push up from Cade’s body and look down at him.
By the minimal light emanating from the top of the steps, I can just about see his face screwed up with his eyes squeezed shut and teeth gritted.
I’m stunned. I don’t know what to do or say. I should use this moment of freedom to make a run for it. But I can’t. Looking at him beneath me, hurt and vulnerable, wondering why the hell he clutched me to him like that, taking the brunt of the fall…
It churns something in my stomach.
It’s swiftly dissolved when Cade hisses, “Fuck’s sake, Elodie, we could have fucking died!”
The venom coming from him has me snapping back to my hatred. I try to get off him, but he’s back on me, whipping his eyes open and his hand that was cradling my head fists a bunch of my hair again.
I yelp and tears spring to my eyes as the throbbing in my head increases.
“That was your fault!” I cry.
He manoeuvres himself from under me as I continue to fight his grip.
He brings us to our feet and yanks me forward.
It’s completely opaque down here, the darkness feeling foreboding instead of comforting.
It smells damp but… sterile. Like rubbing alcohol.
The sound of a door clicking open, along with a depressurizing hiss, echoes around us, bouncing off walls that sound far away.
“Maybe this will teach you some manners.” His voice is deathly calm.
Something cold and rough comes around my neck.
I cringe away, try to fight it, but Caden secures it and releases me.
Then a hand shoves me roughly in my back, and I’m thrown onto the floor.
I gather myself quickly, turn in what I think is a half-circle, and run forward.
I smash my nose into a solid wall as the clicking echoes again.
“Caden!” I pound my fists into the wall. It’s cold and smooth, like glass.
I’m rocked by a vibrating shock in my neck that flings me down to the ground with a scream. It travels down my spine and leaves me stunned. A shock collar.
“If you want to act like a dog, you can be treated like one.” His voice is muffled behind the glass.
He shocks me again and my neck cramps with the speed at which I flinch. I claw at it, unable to find the buckle.
“Caden, let me out!” I find my way back to the wall.
“You can stay in there and think about your behaviour, Elodie. I haven’t got time to coddle you. You’re a grown woman. You can have a good life here. But if you try to make my life hell, I’ll make yours ten times worse.”
My panicked breaths and driving fists on the door are all I can hear, the fear rising so sharp in my throat I start coughing.
“Also, don’t bother trying to get the collar off. There’s a lock on it.”
“Caden, let me out right now, you piece of shit!”
No response comes. Terror fills my lungs. “Caden!”
My heart pounds against my ribcage, fists pound against the glass. Tears spill from my eyes. “Fuck you, Caden!”
He’s gone. He’s fucking left me here.
My hands frantically search for a handle, a gap, anything. I locate a doorknob, but it doesn’t give. Of course, it doesn’t. My legs give out from under me. I collapse to the ground, racking sobs expelling from me.
How could he do this? How could he be so evil?
The ground caresses my legs, so I let my whole body melt into it.
This is a bad place, the darkness says.
“Yeah, no shit.”
I can feel it in the air. An ominous presence that I’m not familiar with. It reeks of cleaning products and dead things. I think I should be grateful it’s pitch black.
As the adrenaline leaves my body and the exhaustion creeps in, the aches flow in.
I’ve bashed my knees, elbows, shoulders.
My head throbs like hell. We really are lucky we’re still in one piece from those stairs.
If we were really in one piece to begin with.
Caden might be as fucked in the head as I am, just in a completely different way.
How cold and merciless can he be? He saw the state I was delivered to him in, saw in plain sight what I came from.
Saw with his own eyes when he stripped me naked what I’ve endured, and he decides to continue that? What kind of monster does that?
The tears come unbidden, through exhaustion and pain. These are the times I need Lewis. When I finally break. He’d always be there. Every single time. His presence made me believe I could get through everything. Then he was taken from me.
My brother died and that was it for me. I was alone.
He took my soul with him. No one else loved me; no one else made me smile.
He took every ribbon of goodness and joy from my life and buried it six feet deep with him.
Sometimes I think about digging through that dirt.
That dirt that separates him from me. Sometimes I think about shovelling heap after heap until I reach the very place that holds my life captive.
Demanding that he come back and return what he stole.
He had no right to take it from me. He had no right to die, to leave me alone, to suck every bright colour out of the world and leave it bleak and suffocating.
Another buzz of the collar rips through my neck and yanks a strained growl from me, anger swelling inside.
If Lewis were here now, he’d wipe the tears away and tell me to stay strong. To find a way to cope.
You can go the distance.
I weep at the memory of him saying those words to me.
Find something you can use.
“I can’t.”
Yes, you can, El.
My sobs come out strangled and hitched.
I miss him so fucking much. I miss his comforting smile, the soothing strokes he’d make down my hair while I cried in his lap.
I miss the dazzling blue eyes that held so much peace, so many promises of a better life one day.
I miss playing with the short, cropped blonde hair that he’d always say was better than mine.
I miss his voice. God, that strong, unwavering, confident voice.
The one that would tell me so many stories while he held me in his arms after getting beat so badly I couldn’t stand straight. I miss his encouraging words.
You’re strong, El, find something.
I shake my head and whisper, “You’re not real.”
I am here with you. Find something.
I sob, sniffle. I try to get my breathing under control, wondering if it’s the dark or my brother talking to me.
Whoever it is, I know they’re here to help me. Another buzz of the collar has me leaping up. I search blindly in the dark. There must be something in Caden Blackwood’s basement that I could use against him.
You can fight him, you can beat this.
A fire sparks to life within me. A fire that’s been dimmed for a long time. Lewis has come back to me in the dark, and with him by my side, I can beat Caden Blackwood.