Chapter 40 The Present
THE PRESENT
CAIDEN
I paced the cage, round and round like a starving animal, boots carving out the same useless path in the concrete. There were scuff marks now, black tattoos from soles that couldn’t stop moving. I couldn’t make myself sit. Not for long.
Amelia sat in the opposite cage.
I tried to ignore her, but she was always there. A reflection, a wound, a problem I couldn’t solve.
“You’re making me dizzy,” she snapped. Her voice cracked, raspy and thin, but she forced it out anyway. “Just stop. Please. I can’t watch you anymore.”
“You’re dizzy because we’re malnourished. Not because my boots are touching the floor.” My voice was rougher than I meant. I didn’t care.
She scowled, fingers digging into her arms. “You think you’re so smart.”
Another lap. My body ached, knees and ankles and every place I’d been bruised in the past week reminding me they existed. “Smarter than you.”
“If you were so smart, we wouldn’t be here.”
The words hit harder than they should. My jaw locked. “You want to blame me? Go ahead. It’s not going to change anything.”
She closed her eyes, head thumping back against the wall. “Just fucking stand still for once.”
“I don’t remember promoting you to warden,” I muttered.
“Better than pacing like a caged wolf. You’re not going to find a way out by wearing a hole in the floor.”
I stopped. Only for a second. Then my muscles twitched, and I found myself moving again, slower this time, eyes fixed on the ground. I hated the cage. Hated the glass. Hated that every time I saw her, I remembered things I’d buried alive.
“You done?” Her words were a challenge. She wanted me to come over there, wanted me to fight her, maybe even hit the glass and see if it would bleed.
“I’ll be done when he lets us out.”
She stared at me, face unreadable. I didn’t know what she was thinking. Didn’t care, I told myself.
I kept moving. The sound of each step bounced off the concrete, made the space feel smaller.
She sighed. She sounded so damn tired. “Why do you do this?”
My laugh was empty. “Why do you care?”
“Because I have to look at you all day.”
“Well, lucky you.”
The fight drained out of her face. “Go to hell.”
I almost smiled. “Already here.”
That was when the light cut out.
Not a flicker. Not a warning. Just instant, predatory dark.
A fist closed around my throat. My skin prickled. The world collapsed. Cage, concrete, the thin barrier of glass between us. It was erased in a matter of seconds. My body forgot how to breathe. The darkness pressed against my eyes like I’d never see again.
Somewhere on the other side of the glass, I heard her gasp. Her breath stuttered, high and shaky. “Caiden?”
I didn’t answer right away. I was too busy counting my heartbeats. They pounded so loud I was sure she could hear them.
The dark started to invent things. My brain tried to make sense of the nothing, tried to conjure shapes out of the thick black.
Corners became movement. Shadows became bodies. I could have sworn I felt someone in the cage with me, moving just out of arm’s reach.
I tasted old panic.
My father’s voice surfaced out of nowhere, low and amused, like smoke curling under a door. Look at you now.
I hated that. Hated how much of him was still under my skin, years after they put him in the ground. I hated that even trapped, even as a grown man, I couldn’t shake the memory of being small, of listening for footsteps, knowing they’d get closer, knowing there was nowhere to hide.
I tried to remember what the basement at home had smelled like. Booze. Sweat. Decay. This place was colder, cleaner, more precise. But the principle was the same: nowhere to run, nowhere to fight. Just endure.
Another voice cut through the black. “Are you there?”
I recognized the fear in her words. I’d heard it before, under bridges, in motel rooms, in places kids weren’t supposed to hide. The ache almost made me laugh.
“I’m here,” I said. My voice sounded too loud. Too human.
Something about her silence made my gut twist.
The darkness pulsed. My brain kept generating monsters, eyes and teeth in every angle. I braced against the wall, fingers digging into the cold concrete, willing myself not to lose it.
I wondered if she could hear my breathing. If she could sense, somehow, that I was just as scared as she was.
She whispered, “Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” The words came out before I could stop them. I hated the softness in my voice. Hated that even after everything, my first instinct was to keep her from falling apart.
“I can’t see anything,” she said, voice barely a thread.
“I know.” My hands flexed uselessly. “It’s just dark. That’s all.”
I’d been in worse. That’s what I told myself.
The dark pressed closer, cold hands around my neck.
I remember closets. I remember blankets wrapped over my head, trying to stifle every sound so nobody would find me. I remember the way his shadow fell through the crack under the door, stretching, growing, swallowing everything.
The urge to scream rattled in my chest like a trapped fly. Instead, I pressed my forehead against the bars, breathing slow and steady, counting off numbers in my head. Anything to keep the emptiness from overflowing.
Was Amelia crying? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was just the sound of her breath snagging on her ribs.
“You still breathing?” I growled.
“Not sure,” she whispered.
I let my head hang. “Start counting. It helps.”
“What?”
“Just do it. Count to five. Then start over.”
She didn’t answer, but I could almost feel her concentrating. The quiet between us buzzed.
I pictured her on the other side of the glass, hugging her knees, eyes wide and white in the dark. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to break through, just to touch her shoulder, just to prove she was still real.
The air felt like glass shards cutting my throat.
Why was he doing this? The psychopath upstairs. I imagined him sitting in the light, watching us on some hidden camera, grinning at the panic. Flicking the switch on and off, just to remind himself he owned us.
What was it about people like him, always needing to own something helpless?
The seconds dragged. I felt each one crawl under my skin and make a home there.
I pictured my father’s laugh. I wanted to be better than him. But sometimes, in the dark, I wondered if the rot had gotten into my bones too.
Would I survive this? Would she?
I started talking, just to fill the space. “He’s probably just fucking with us. He wants us scared.”
“He’s succeeding,” she said.
“What else is new.”
I heard her shift, heard her knuckles crack. “Is he going to kill us?”
I didn’t want to answer. “Not if I can help it.”
A beat. Then: “You really think you can stop him?”
“I’ll try.”
“You always say that,” she snapped.
“What do you want from me, a guarantee? Nothing in life is guaranteed.”
The words echoed, bitter as bile. My father had taught me that.
The dark thickened, pressed against my skull.
I wanted to blame her for something. Anything. Maybe if I could hate her enough, I wouldn’t care what happened in the end. But hate and fear started to feel the same, down in the marrow.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Are you scared?” she asked suddenly.
I waited. “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
The silence between us was a grave.
Then, without warning, the light snapped back on.
Pain hit my eyes. Everything flooded white. I blinked, trying to adjust, trying not to look as relieved as I was.
She hunched away from the glare, like she’d been shot.
We stared at each other through the smeared glass. I saw her, all of her: the trembling lips, the haunted eyes, the bruises on her wrists. Barely hanging on.
She saw me too. And I didn’t like what was staring back.
The world was smaller now. The cage, the memory, her presence. All of it heavier.
Above us, something creaked. Footsteps on the stairs. I knew what came next.
But in that moment, it was just us. Naked and shaking.
Maybe that was the worst part.
The footsteps grew louder. Wood groaning under boots, relentless and heavy. Each step pulled the world tighter around my throat. I watched the door, watched the tiny rectangle of light at the top of the basement stairs grow and then shrink as he blocked it out.
The kidnapper came down slow, savoring the moment like he was walking into a surprise party. Everything about him reeked of patience, like a wolf that knew the sheep could never escape.
He stood on the lowest step, his hands loose at his sides. His eyes flickered over both cages, then fixed on me. He smiled. No warmth in it.
His voice was soft, almost kind. “Isn’t it peaceful, how quiet it gets down here at night?”
I didn’t answer. Neither did Amelia.
He smiled wider, showing molars. He rested his hand on the mesh of the cage, close enough that I could see the veins crawling up his wrist. He held the silence as if it was a living thing.
The knife appeared from his belt. Smooth, practiced, the movement so casual it made my skin crawl. I couldn’t stop staring at the blade. The edge gleamed, a thin thread of light in the basement gloom.
“I was thinking,” he said. “If I opened the cage right now, which one of you would try for the knife first?”
Neither of us breathed.
He looked at me. Then at her. “Or maybe you’d both just freeze. Bunnies in a snare.” He tapped the point of the blade against the steel. “You ever see what happens when two animals are cornered? Sometimes they rip each other apart for the hell of it.”
I gritted my teeth. “Why don’t you open it and find out?”
His head tilted, like I was something in a petri dish. “Bravery. I like that. You talk big. But what do you do when the door actually opens?”
I stepped up to the bars, as close as I could get, hands wrapping around cold metal. “I’d kill you.”
“No,” he said, voice gentle, as if he was explaining math to a child. “You’d try. You’d fail.” His gaze slid to Amelia. “But I wonder, which of you has more to lose?”
The room throbbed with silence. I could hear her breathing, thin and sick, like a dying animal.
He crouched, coming level with my eyes. “You think you’re a hero. She thinks you’ll save her.”
I wanted to leap at him, wrap my hands around his throat. But all I could do was stand there, the rage boiling in my head, heart pounding out of rhythm.
He watched me simmer, let the moment drag. “You want to know what I think?” The knife drifted towards the lock, slow and deliberate. He ran the tip around the edge, tapping metal against metal.
“I think you both make a lot of noise, but at the end of the day, you’re just scared kids. That’s what you’ll always be. Scared and weak and waiting for someone to save you.”
He stood up, brushing dust from his knees. “I could let you out right now. Set the two of you loose. But then the fun would be over. Where’s the art in that?”
He paced in front of the cages, slicing the air with the knife, watching our eyes follow every movement. The bastard was getting off on it.
Amelia whimpered, soft, barely a sound at all.
He grinned. “She’s the one that would run,” he said to me. “Not you. You’re the one that stays and takes the punishment.”
“Try me,” I spat.
He pressed his face close to the bars, shadows eating the lines of his jaw. “You think pain scares me? I was born in it.” He tapped the knife against his temple. “Up here, you either learn to love the dark or the dark eats you alive.”
He stepped back, studied us with that blank, cold stare. “Sleep tight, pets.”
He left as silently as he’d come, footsteps fading into the ceiling, leaving a bruise of dread behind.
For a minute, the only sound was the hum of the basement light and our twin heartbeats battering the air.
Then, from the other side of the glass: “Caiden.”
I swallowed. “Yeah?”
Her voice trembled. “I don’t want to die here.”
I closed my eyes. A thousand memories crashed together. Every bruise, every scream, every time I’d failed to protect anything. But something was different now. The violence in my blood had a name and a purpose.
“You won’t.” My voice sounded alien. “I’ll get you out. I promise.”
Afraid to say the rest out loud: I would do anything. Anything. Break every bone in my body. Rip out his heart. Sell my own soul. I would burn the world to keep her breathing.
But that thought scared me almost as much as the knife.
I pressed my palm to the glass, watching her mirror me. We sat in our boxes, caged and broken, but not dead yet.
I wouldn’t let it end that way. Let him play his games. Let him turn the dark on and off. We’d find a way out.
Even if it killed me.