Chapter 21 #3
Her gaze flicks to the table of trinkets. She plucks one of my knives. Her thumb checks the spine. She brings the flat to my chest, trails it up my sternum, over my throat. My pulse knocks against steel. She smiles when I don’t flinch.
“You’re not afraid of me.”
“I’d rather die at your hand than anyone else’s,” I say, and her smile disappears.
Color climbs her cheeks. She drags the spine across my collarbone, maps a line down my ribs, then memory lights her eyes.
She lowers the blade and sets it across my thigh the way I set it on hers in the bathroom at Mirage.
Flat, cool metal laid high and deliberate, point angled right at my cock, exactly in my eyeline.
“Hold still,” she whispers.
“Yes, darling.”
She breathes me in from that new nearness, her mouth a ghost over mine, and then she sinks to her knees. The knife stays where she placed it, a bright line of trust across my leg. I can’t thrust without shifting steel. That’s the point. Restraint. Her rules.
Her fingers wrap me; her mouth takes me and my head tips back against the chair. I flex my bound hands once against the chair and let her set the pace. Praise breaks out of me in a gravel I don’t recognize. “That’s it, Lindy girl. Use me. Take what you want.”
She glances up through her lashes, triumphant.
Outside, fireworks mark the new year. Inside, the blade gleams on my thigh, anchoring me.
I don’t move. I can’t move. I let her take everything.
The basement lets me forget my rage for a while.
When she makes rules I can obey, when she follows my rules, the world makes sense again.
The following morning, I don’t tie her. I teach her to hide knives in everyday things: the underlayer of a purse, the seam of a hoodie, the underwire of a bra.
I show her where to stab if she only gets one shot.
Under the chin and up, the soft notch above the collarbone and down, the inside of the thigh and pull.
I say the anatomy out loud so it lives somewhere she can grab it when the world tilts.
Not everything is edge. Some of it is patience. I make her sit with her back to the wall and watch the door for seven minutes. “What did you see?” I ask. She lists small things. The way the dust spins when air moves, the overhead hum that dips every time the heater kicks on. She’s incredible.
I push further because I have to. I tie her wrists with a zip tie, loop a scarf between her teeth. “How long?” she mumbles around it.
“Three minutes,” I say, and set the watch where she can see it. I step away, to the edge of the room, listening to her breathe. She closes her eyes, nails into her palms. When her hands stop trembling, she tips her face toward me and taps three against her thigh. Okay. I pull the gag.
“What did you do?”
“Found my breath,” she says. “Made the fear smaller with my count.”
“Again.” Five minutes this time. When she taps, I’m already there, cutting her free. “Stop means stop,” I remind myself out loud, carving the law into my bones.
I cuff her to the steel pipe and turn the lights out completely.
I sit across the room with my back to the wall.
I listen for the difference between panic-breath and control-breath.
At first it’s shallow, quick. Then she finds the count.
“Three. Five.” I hear her whisper into the dark.
My chest hurts with something I’ll never fix.
When I flip the light, her eyes are wet but stubborn. “Good girl,” I say, unlocking the cuff. “You stayed present.”
“Sometimes, this scares me,” she whispers, voice hoarse.
“Good,” I say, and cup her jaw so she feels the steadiness in my hand. “Fear means you’re still alive.” I kiss her temple.
The next day I ration her water and don’t give her food.
I let the clock eat half a day while we work.
Her mouth goes dry; she keeps telling me her head aches.
I finally set a glass on the floor in front of her and tell her to earn it by getting out of the tie without help.
She studies the plastic, the angle, her wrists.
She pivots, threads a lace, pulls until the tie smokes apart.
She doesn’t reach for the water. She looks at me. I nod. Then she drinks.
“Again,” she says, wiping her mouth. I laugh, low and relieved, because I didn’t have to ask.
When she hits walls, I change the drill, not the goal. I time her, write the numbers on a notepad and leave it where she can see them. 3:11. 2:47. 1:59. Odd. Odd. Odd. Her smile when she beats herself is a savior I didn’t know I needed.
I watch everything. Her pupils. Her hands. The way her shoulders creep toward her ears when she’s afraid, but I never let the Machine truly touch her skin.
The after is what keeps me sane. Arnica on her wrists. Salve along the healing split in her lip. Honeyed tea in a mug that fits both her hands. I sit on the floor with my back to the wall and let her climb into my lap, the only soft I allow to live here.
When I have gone through my to-do list and then gone through it again, when she stops asking “what’s next” or “are we done” and instead anticipates, when she starts finishing her coffee and tries to beat me down here, punching the bag while she waits for me, when I feel like the only thing left to tell her is that I love her, I kneel in front of her, gun oil still on my hands, and say the words I’ll put in her head every fucking day until they’re louder than anything else.
“I will always come for you, Lindy girl. No matter how pissed I am right now. No matter how bad it gets. No matter who takes you. No matter what they do to you. Never forget that. Never.”
Her lips tremble, but she nods. “There are men in this world who will do things that make you wish for death,” I tell her, forehead to forehead. “You don’t give in. You don’t ever fucking give in. You fight. Do you hear me?”
She nods again.
“You fight like hell, Lindy girl. You hold on.” I kiss her brow, then press mine back to hers. “I will find you,” I whisper. “Every time.”
The house keeps our silence, our already spoken secrets.
The basement is our truce. We don’t talk about ghosts.
London’s name isn’t so much as whispered.
Drill after drill sands the edge off my rage.
Somewhere between tape and zip ties, between blindfold and steel, forgiveness shows up unexpectedly.
I don’t point it out, or ask if she feels it.
I don’t need to, because it takes up most of the oxygen in the room.
I will always chase her. I will always save her.
I will destroy this earth before I let it take her from me.
No one gets to take her from me. She dies at no other hand.
If she ever wanted to end me, she could without all the theatrics and lies; she’d only have to leave.
So I armor her. We both follow the rules and I break more each day for her. And until the truth proves itself, I choose her anyway. When the truth proves itself; I choose her still.