Chapter 39 The Present
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
The man's departure unleashed a monstrous darkness; it swelled, grew, and filled the space with a chilling, deep dread and suffocating silence.
The light had disappeared, and obsidian hues fluttered through the singular window. There weren’t any stars glimmering, that I knew.
It was as if the darkness had swallowed the outside, and we were falling into a black hole.
Not even the moonlight was noticeable, its presence was now a forgotten ghost.
Silence dripped sorrowfully. The barrier hadn’t moved, and I was thrown into an isolated terror.
I knew Caiden was on the other side, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t hear him. He was so far wedged into the shadows, he blended with them perfectly.
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing slipped out. My senses were frozen in time, coated with a seemingly permanent shock. Time moved slowly, and I wondered if time was passing at all.
At this point, it was unknown how long we had been gone for. I wondered if Shane and Sabrina were looking for us. If they were, they had given up by now.
We were far gone, and rescue was becoming a lost hope.
I tried to imagine my home. My home that I was never going to see again. The image was faint, like a blurry picture taken from a distance.
Once that image fled my mind, it wandered to further memories. Childhood. Lillian’s face fell in and out of my head. My mother’s scrutinizing and haunted face going round and round, like screams of terror in my mind.
Nights and days filled with isolation and panic. Walking alone with my sorrows, feeling like a phantom in my own home.
The thoughts landed on Caiden. The contempt in his eyes burned with each abusive word, like a hateful fire. The sting of his actions coursing through me like a hurricane.
Each small thing felt like a crushing weight, and the turmoil in my body manifested as dreadful flames. I was corruption incarnate, a two-legged monster sinking deeper into the viscous, crimson pools of blood, the coppery tang infecting me.
He sat there, unmoving, uncaring, and my soul fell deeper into dusk.
Hours passed by of this dark stillness. I was too weak to do anything other than collapse further into myself like a dying star. Seeking comfort from Caiden was not an option, he was in his own hell in the dark on the other side.
A darkened inferno was raining down onto me, and I no longer fought it, but welcomed it, succumbing to its fatal grip.
I was startled awake by a sudden, animal scream.
My own, I realized, when my throat burned a moment later. I’d slept, or perhaps just slipped into some state of suspended terror, and now my body had remembered how to react.
I watched the sun’s rays bleach the world gray and then disappear altogether.
Light and dark, light and dark, until I was sure my mind was splitting on the axis of it.
Hunger gnawed, then retreated, and returned sharper, always sharper, until I could hear my own bones chewing on my flesh.
I hallucinated, I think.
Sometimes the glass sweated blood; sometimes the cinderblock walls leered with faces I’d seen in my worst memories.
Sometimes the rats came out and spoke with my father’s voice, or my mother’s, or Lillian’s, and I did not bother to answer because I could not tell if I still possessed a mouth.
I watched Caiden the whole time.
Even in the haze of waking nightmares and real nightmares, I counted every time his ribs moved up and down, the way he pressed his forehead to the glass as if wishing to bash straight through it by willpower alone.
He scared me less now than before.
Maybe that was the point of our captor’s design: whittle us down to the gristle, burn away the old rot, so that all that remained was the most basic and desperate urge to survive.
When the food came, I ate. He did too.
Some of it made me sick, and some of it made me sleep for so long that waking up felt like being born again in a world where I had never known sunlight.
Sometimes, when I woke, the tray was gone, and I could not recall eating at all.
Maybe I had eaten my own tongue out of madness. Maybe I had willed myself hollow.
The barrier was warm now, smeared with our sweat and the condensation of desperate breath. Caiden had started pressing his lips to it, as if breathing the ghost of me would keep him alive.
When I touched my face to the glass, I could almost hear his pulse, slow and thick as oil.
Once, in the hours before dawn, I heard him sob. He tried to hide it, but the sound traveled through the barrier anyway, warped into a sick, animal whimper.
I lay on my side and watched the ceiling rotate slowly overhead.
If I closed my eyes, the world swung like a pendulum, and I could almost believe, for a split second, that I’d wake up outside, with the wind in my hair and a forest to run through.
The walls were closing in, day by day.
Each moment I spent in this cage, I felt haunted by the mysterious man who trapped us in here. Tormenting us, taunting us, breaking me apart.
I could still feel the phantom touch of his cold and sickening hands on me.
The darkness didn’t help. It intensified the suffocation and helplessness.
I slept in bursts, each waking worse than the last. My body ached. My fingers tingled with an electric panic that crawled up my arms.
I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to even open my eyes and look at Caiden through the milky glass, but the claustrophobia was a weight on my chest, a parasite feeding off every shaky breath.
Sometimes I sat up, curled so tight I was almost fetal, and pressed my forehead to the cage wall until my skin went numb. Sometimes I paced my half of the cell, circling like a caged rat, the rhythm of my bare feet on concrete the only sound I could control.
But mostly, I just lay there, feeling my heart pound out a warning.
Not safe, not safe, not safe.
The man hadn’t come back in a while. Maybe hours. Maybe days. I’d lost all sense of time, and the thought clawed at me, a raw animal terror that I was already dead, that I’d never left the forest, that this was hell and my punishment was to keep reliving the same panic over and over without end.
I jammed my hands between my knees and squeezed, trying to slow the tremor, but it only made the rest of me shake harder.
My mouth was dry. My tongue felt like a clump of dirty cotton.
I tried to count my breaths—four in, six out, like Mom taught me years ago— but they kept getting stuck on the inhale, a catch in my throat that made me want to scream.
My ribs stuttered; the world tilted.
The panic attack came on so fast that I didn’t recognize it as panic. Only the roaring certainty that I was dying, for real this time, my heart exploding in my chest, my breath dissolving into nothing.
The world blanched into a white, howling noise.
I clawed at the wire, blinding myself with tears I didn’t even feel, and all I could do was choke on half-formed syllables that never made it past my lips.
On the other side of the glass, Caiden’s shadow jerked upright, a rapid, almost predatory lunge, as if he’d been hoping for the chance to witness my final collapse.
“You’re breathing too fast,” Caiden said, voice muffled but clear enough to cut through. “You’re going to black out.”
His face was a blur behind the glass, a shape that resolved slowly into a real boy, a boy I hated, a boy I needed.
He pressed his palm to the divider. “You’re fine. It’s just air. You’re panicking yourself into it.”
I tried to tell him to go fuck himself, but all that came out was a wet, animal sob.
My chest caved in, then ballooned out.
I was a malfunctioning machine, spiraling into brokenness.
“I can’t,” I gasped. “I can’t—I can’t—”
The words broke up in my throat, stuttered into shreds by the convulsions of my lungs. My whole body felt like a chewed wire, twitching and sparking and not quite dead.
He dragged his fingers down the surface, smearing a streak between us. “You’re not dying, Amelia. You’re just losing your shit.”
He sounded so calm it made me want to rip my own face off.
But then his voice cracked, a hairline fracture running through the practiced apathy. “Look at me. Not the walls. Me.”
I tried, but the world was blurry, tunneling in and out, edges sharpening then softening like a bad dream.
He kept talking, voice low and regular, counting for me. “In on two, out for four. Listen to me. I’m counting. That’s all.”
And I did. I followed the rhythm: in on his command, out when he let me. I focused on the fog his mouth made against the glass.
I watched it appear and vanish.
I could have killed him for the way his voice slid between my ears, bypassing the rest of me. I could have killed myself for how badly I wanted to obey.
But I did as he said, because the alternative was obliteration.
Slowly, my lungs stopped convulsing, the tremor stilled to a shiver. Bile pooled at the back of my throat, but at least I was breathing.
My body remembered the bruises, the bruises remembered my body. I was here and I was alive, and that was the worst part.
He watched me with a predator’s patience. “Better,” he said, and his hand lingered on the glass, fingers splayed as if he might break through.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I said, voice a ruin, all gravel and salt. “You’re not my keeper.”
His mouth twitched, a ghost of a smile. “You sure about that?”
I pressed my palms together until my knuckles turned white.
He was still there, staring at me. “Try to sleep,” he finally said, soft now, almost defeated. “You’ll need it for whatever comes next.”
I curled up, knees to chest, and let the sweat dry to a tacky film.
I listened to the silence, to the far-off, dripping tap of a world that had gone on without us, to the rhythmic pulse of my own blood, always, always reminding me that I remained.
Each time I blinked, the cage returned: the concrete, the rust, the stink of old metal and urine, the ghostly afterimage of Caiden’s face when I had nearly drowned in the river.
How many times could a person die and wake up in the same body?
The ache in my skull had matured to a steady, buzzing halo; when I pressed my fingers to my temples, I half-expected them to sink through scalp and bone, burrowing in to scoop out the rot inside.
It was late.
I could tell by the way the yellow bulb overhead seemed to ooze rather than shine, casting everything in a sickly, buttery pallor.
There was no sound from above, not even the footsteps of our captor.
That should have been comforting, but instead the quiet only sharpened the edges of my thoughts, made the dread more acute.
I could not stop reliving what had happened, the heavy, blunt fact of it, the way I’d dissociated just enough to survive, only to have the memory flood back in with a vengeance as soon as my guard was down.
I craved oblivion. I wanted it more than I would ever admit to anyone, even myself.
Oblivion: the erasure of what had happened in this room, the reset of all my inner clocks, the mercy of waking up somewhere else—anywhere else, even if it meant being back in that surging, freezing river, gasping Caiden’s name as the undertow peeled the skin off my bones.
Instead, I was left with the gnawing knowledge that nothing would ever really end, not for me.
I would keep cycling through these deaths and rebirths, each time a little less myself, until they finally carted out what was left and the world could get on with forgetting me.