Chapter 46 The Present #2
He shrugged, dragging the edge of his heel along the concrete. “We’re all monsters in here. Some of us just get caught.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it, which made it worse.
The words burrowed into my skin, into the scar tissue I’d so carefully formed over the last decade.
I wanted to refute it, to claw the accusation out of the air and shove it down his throat, but I knew he wasn’t wrong. Not really. I’d learned early how to bite, how to make the bad thing happen first, so at least you could say you saw it coming.
I pressed my knees to my chest, bony under the thin fabric. “I never wanted to hurt anyone,” I said, voice low. “I just didn’t want to be the one getting slaughtered.” My tongue was thick, words sticky as glue. “You made it so easy to hate you, Caiden. Maybe that was your plan all along.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “We’re just ghosts. Ghosts don’t get to pick their enemies.”
A wind rattled the basement window, cold coming in through the cracks. I shivered.
Caiden raked his nails down the divider, making a sound like a dying animal. “You cold?”
“Freezing.” I wrapped my arms around myself, but it was useless; I was too thin for insulation, just a rack of bones and spite wrapped in a soiled T-shirt.
He looked me over. “You look like you’re already decomposing.” The way he said it, I almost smiled.
“Good,” I said. “I hope it speeds things up.”
He pressed his cheek to the glass. “You’d haunt this place just to piss me off, wouldn’t you?”
“If it’s the last thing I do.”
I tried to keep my voice steady, but there was a tremor in it that matched the one in my hands. I could feel the panic, deep and poisonous, worming its way through my marrow.
I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to live like this.
“Bet you’d make a hot ghost,” he said, deadpan. “That’s your whole thing, right? Haunting people.”
“My whole thing is surviving you,” I snapped, and for a moment we just stared at each other, neither of us willing to blink first.
“You think he’ll make us eat each other?” I asked, the words coming out slurred and dreamy.
Caiden’s head jerked up. He glared at me through the film of condensation and grease. “You wish,” he said, but there was no bite left in it.
“You’d taste like shit,” I said, just to keep the silence from congealing around us. “Too bitter.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who’d taste bad. Like old chicken, left in the sun too long. All string and gristle.”
I laughed, or tried to, but it came out as a cough, the sound echoing off the damp stone. “That would be an ironic way to go. Eaten and digested by my childhood enemy.”
He ignored that, retreating into himself again, shoulders hunched and face turned away.
The glass was smeared with our fingerprints, with the oil and sweat of two bodies refusing oblivion.
We didn’t talk much after that. The room crept into night, the only light coming from the jaundiced bulb in the stairwell, barely enough to silhouette the glass divider.
Hours passed.
The quiet was almost absolute, except for the occasional rattle of pipes or the distant, arrhythmic footsteps of the man upstairs.
I wondered what he was doing. Sleeping, maybe. Or sitting at his table, staring into the black, listening to the silence to see if we’d begun to turn on each other yet.
I pressed my ear to the divider. I could hear Caiden’s breath, slow and ragged, and the soft thud of his head as he knocked it against the glass in slow, measured intervals.
Maybe he was counting time, maybe just keeping himself awake. I wondered if he was still awake at all.
I was about to say something—anything, just to break the tension—when the door at the top of the stairs shrieked open.
The sound rumbled through the basement, dragging me up from whatever half-sleep I’d managed to claw out for myself.
Caiden jerked upright, too, eyes snapping to the stairwell. For a second, neither of us moved. The steps came slow, deliberate, as though the man wanted to savor the moment, to make the horror last as long as possible.
The metal stairs groaned under his weight. I felt my pulse spike and my throat close up. In that instant, I wanted to disappear into the concrete, become nothing but bone and dust, something the man wouldn’t bother with.
He stepped into the pool of yellow light, smirking. His teeth were too white, the smile too wide, and he looked at us like a farmer checking his livestock before a slaughter. “Awake?” he called, voice syrupy and false. “Or did my little pets finally wear each other out?”
I said nothing. I watched the way his hands hovered by the buttons on his remote, the way he eyed the divider, calculating, always calculating.
Caiden spat at the floor, baring his teeth. “Come in here and say that, you coward.”
The man’s eyes flashed with something feral. “I said you’d break first, and guess what? You did.”
He stepped forward, knelt so his face was level with mine through the divider.
I wanted to back away, but I couldn’t. My body was a dead weight, fused to the dirty concrete. “You look paler than usual, darling,” he whispered, lowering his voice. “Maybe you need a little special attention.”
His gaze slithered over my face, then dropped lower, cataloguing every tremor, every bruise.
I heard Caiden’s fists battering the glass, a primal bellow ripped from his throat. The man didn’t even flinch. His tongue curled over his teeth, wetting his lips like he could taste my fear through the glass.
In the sick fluorescence of the basement, his face was a mask. Something below animal.
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” Caiden’s voice was brutal, thunderous, but the divider turned it soft and distant, like a memory of violence instead of the real thing.
“You remind me of a dog I once had as a child,” he said, voice drifting, as he stared at Caiden.
“It bit and bit, until one day my father broke its jaw with a brick. Still tried to bite with its mouth hanging open. That’s what you are.
That’s what you’ll always be. An animal with nothing but its bite left. ”
“Fuck you,” Caiden snapped.
The man ignored him.
“You know, at first I wasn’t sure which of you would make the better subject. But in the end, it’s always the girl.” He said this like it was a law of science, a principle etched into the marrow of the universe.
He unlocked the cage on my side with a flourish, the click echoing through the basement like a gunshot. I tried to scramble away, but my body was spent; I managed only a pathetic crab-walk to the far corner, clutching my knees to my chest.
Caiden’s shout vibrated the glass, a wordless, animal sound, but there was nothing he could do.
The man stood over me, silhouette tall and precise, his expression one of infinite patience, as if he could wait forever for me to exhaust myself.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” he said, and he grabbed my shoulder, anchoring me to the filthy slab of concrete.
I thought I’d panic, or scream, but there wasn’t enough air left in my body.
I just watched him, eyes wide, time stretching into a dream.
I could see each pore on his face, the sick shine of saliva webbing his lips, the slow dilation of his pupils as his hand closed around my throat. Not tight enough to kill, just enough to make me want the next breath more than anything.
His fingers dug into the bruises already mapped across my skin. It was almost an act of cartography: charting pain, tracing the fault lines of every old wound, every remembered violation.
I heard Caiden’s body strike the glass again, a dull, meaty thud, and the man’s smile crept wider, savoring the sound.
On some level I knew he was doing it for Caiden, for the way it made him howl, the way his rage fogged the divider and left it streaked with spit and blood.
We were the show, the dark mirror, and every twitch of agony was a gift to the audience.
He pressed his mouth to my ear, the breath hot and reeking of old cigarettes. “You’re going to thank me for this,” he whispered. “You’re going to remember me for the rest of your short, beautiful life.”
I heard Caiden’s fists, the scrape of his body against the divider, the animal grunt in his throat.
The man seemed to savor it; he tilted his head, listening to our misery as if it were a composition he’d written himself.
He turned me to face the glass, so I could see Caiden, so Caiden could see me.
I tried to avert my eyes, but the man’s fist closed in the nest of my hair and jerked my chin up until my gaze met Caiden’s through the greasy, smudged partition.
There was a helplessness in Caiden’s face I’d never seen before, and it felt like a new kind of death.
The next part was fast, and slow, and endless.
I was loopy from the drugged food, but still there.
Everything after that was a stuttering reel, the world breaking into single frames: his hand clamped at the base of my skull; my body going numb except for a thick, burning ache everywhere he touched; the wet click of his tongue; the animal, senseless noises from the other side of the glass.
My face was mashed flat against the divider, Caiden’s eyes just inches away, wide and crazed and wet.
I didn’t cry or scream or beg. There wasn’t any point. I’d been emptied, scraped out by days of fear and hunger and previous iterations of this exact trauma.
I watched myself from outside my body, a ghost watching a meat puppet, and I realized this was probably the only way to survive it.
It was a performance, a ritual, I realized. The man had done this before. I could tell by the way he spaced his words, the way he forced me to watch the reflection of myself as he pulled my hair, the way he adjusted my hips for the best view, the best angle of despair.
It was calculated. He liked to see the ruin he made.
In the sick darkness, I had a moment of clarity.
The times Caiden had come onto me when we were teenagers, there was some part of me that wanted it. Always. A demented, deprived part of me that yearned to be filled with something other than hollowness.
Despite the anger, despite the hatred.
This was nothing like how it was with Caiden.
Being wanted and being consumed were two different things. I’d always known that, even when I pretended not to, even when I let myself believe that there was something sickly romantic about our mutual destruction.
Caiden was hunger and violence and hate, but he was always human. He was always, at the root, my equal. We could hurt each other, but never erase.
The man was nothing but devour. He was the black hole at the center of the world, and we were the scraps flung into his event horizon.
It was not an act of wanting, not a collapse of mutual fury or the old, sick ache for absolution through pain.
It was nothing, and that was the point. It was obliteration made flesh. A destruction so complete it left no space for memory or hunger or even hate.
I was only a body here, a sack of needs, a thing to puncture and drain.
I’d spent my whole life fighting not to be an object and now, at the bottom of it all, that was all I was. A shape for his pleasure, a reflection of my own agony, a thing to shred.
There was no power, no transaction, not even the pretense of hunger. Only the fulfillment of some ritual humiliation, the satisfaction of seeing the animal break.
And I knew he would never stop until he had spooned the last remnants of warmth off my bones.
Afterwards, the man zipped his pants. “You see, son?” he said, not even looking at Caiden. “Nothing in the world can keep a woman from being just what she is. No matter how you cage ‘em, they’ll always show you their true nature.”
Caiden made a sound that was half growl, half sob.
My face was a mask of nothing but inside, my brain curled in on itself, a snail recoiling from the knife.
I saw the man retreat, his footsteps a slow waltz, the door closing behind him with a wet, metallic sigh.
I collapsed, ragged and boneless, onto the filthy cement.
Not even the rats dared approach. I was a beacon of rot, a blend of old agony and fresh shame.
I think I slept, or maybe I just blacked out and woke with a migraine that made my teeth ache.
A warmth pressed to the glass: Caiden’s hand. He was still there, still a living, breathing animal.
He hadn’t looked away. He hadn’t left. I wanted to hate him for it, but for once I couldn’t tell if I was more afraid of being seen or of being left alone in the dark.
At the end of the day, I was grateful for Caiden’s presence, and I realized that we could never go back to how it was when we were kids.
The darkness between us had been eclipsed by some sort of strange new light, a bond forged in pain.