Chapter Eight #3
The light snaps off. Darkness rushes back too slowly, full of floating spots.
I hear the scrape of boots repositioning.
Feel rather than see one of them come behind me again.
Then something tightens around the chair itself.
Rope. They’re securing it to the wall bracket behind me, or maybe the pipe stub jutting from the baseboard, something fixed and heavy.
Not trusting the chair alone anymore. Not trusting me.
Good, a savage part of me thinks again. Make them work.
The rope cinches tighter. The chair won’t tip now.
Another length goes across my chest, pinning my back against the slats.
Breathing becomes shallower immediately.
I strain once against it, testing. No give.
The boss folds his arms and watches.
“Now,” he says, “we can stop pretending you’re in control of anything here.”
My heart pounds so hard it hurts. But beneath the fear, anger still burns. Bright enough to keep shape around.
“Then why are you trying so hard to prove it?”
Something in the room changes. Not loudly. Not visibly to anyone else, maybe. But the boss’s attention narrows. He steps forward until he’s standing directly in front of me and braces one hand on the wall beside my head. Close, but not touching. Crowding the air itself.
“Because,” he says, voice low now, “some people only understand loss when it arrives in stages.”
His eyes move over my bruised face, the blood at my lip, the ropes across my chest and wrists, the rigid set of my body against the chair.
“I’m teaching you.”
I want to knee him in the throat.
Instead I say, “You’re talking too much.”
For a split second, I think he might laugh. Instead he looks over his shoulder at the men.
“You see?” he says. “That’s why she interests him.”
The name stays unspoken, but it’s there again, dragged between them like bait on a hook. My hands clench uselessly behind the chair. The boss turns back.
“He frightens you,” he says. “But not like this.”
It isn’t a question. I say nothing. His smile comes back, small and satisfied.
“No. Not like this.”
The flashlight returns, this time angled lower, sweeping over my tied wrists, my bruised shoulder, the rope across my chest, lingering just long enough to make the inventory feel deliberate.
The boss takes the hunting knife from the table and flips it once in his hand, testing the balance.
My whole body goes rigid. He sees. Of course he sees.
He steps closer again and rests the flat of the blade, not the edge, against the rope across my chest. Cold metal. A warning. Not cutting. Not yet.
“Men like Marius,” he says softly, “forget that wanting something paints a target on it.”
The knife slides upward, still flat, tracing the line of the rope only to my collarbone, then away. I fight not to recoil. He smiles anyway, because he can feel it in the air.
“This,” he says, lowering the knife, “is what happens when powerful men become distracted.”
He hands the blade back to the smoker without looking.
Then he nods once toward the others. The heavyset man moves to one side of the chair.
The smoker comes to the other. The second man remains behind me, one hand settling on the top slat, close enough that I can feel the heat of his body through the gaps in the wood.
Not touching me. Containing me. The boss steps back to watch.
And that, more than anything, makes the cabin feel suddenly airless.
The lantern hums softly. Wind whispers at the broken window.
Somewhere out in the trees, an owl calls once and goes silent.
My breathing sounds too loud in my own ears.
The boss’s gaze moves over the arrangement of bodies around me and seems to find it pleasing.
“Careful,” he says to them.
The word is almost gentle.
Then, after a beat, “Not enough to leave marks I don’t approve of.”
I close my eyes for one heartbeat. Open them again. No surrender. Not where he can see it.
The heavy man’s hand lands on the chair back beside my shoulder, fingers curling over splintered wood. The smoker shifts closer to my left, blocking more of the weak lantern light.
The boss sits down in the crooked chair near the stove as though settling in for a performance.
It’s the smoker who moves first.
He lunges without warning, fisting a brutal hand in my hair and wrenching my head back until pain flashes hot across my scalp.
My breath catches. His face is still hidden behind the mask, but at the edge of it I catch the shadow of stubble along his jaw, the rough outline of a smirk I hate on sight.
His gaze drags over me with ugly, deliberate intent.
“Ready?” he snarls.
And then it hits me fully.
Not the ropes. Not the chair. Not the cabin. Not even the boss watching from the stove.
This.
They aren’t just holding me.
They’re going to use me.
And I still don’t know why.
The boss’s voice cuts across the room from where he sits watching. “Bite, kick, claw. Do whatever you like. I’ll only make sure you pay for every second of it.”
I know then that if I fight too hard, he will kill me.
The knowledge settles over me with cold, crushing certainty.
Like a trapped animal, I dart a look around the room, searching for anything, an opening, a weakness, a mistake.
There is none. Only the lantern’s sickly glow, the warped walls of the cabin, the other men closing in, and the smoker standing over me with that same ugly confidence.
I barely have time to breathe before his hand knots in my hair again, wrenching my head back with brutal force.
Pain flashes across my scalp.
Then comes the assault of it, sudden, violent, and overwhelming enough to steal my breath before my mind can catch up.
I gag, choke, and the room lurches sickly around me as panic explodes through every nerve.
Tears spring uselessly to my eyes. The boss says nothing from where he watches, and somehow that silence was worse.
I pull against the ropes until my wrists feel flayed raw, but the chair holds and the men hold and the room holds, trapping every ragged sound inside it.
Panic becomes physical, a living thing clawing up my chest while the assault goes on with mechanical cruelty.
Tears run hot over my skin and disappear into the ruin of the moment.
The smoker’s breathing turns rougher, uglier.
He does not slow. He does not stop. And from near the stove, the boss remains perfectly still, observing with a kind of measured satisfaction that makes everything feel even more hopeless.
I try to relax my throat as best I can so I can still breathe.
Still, I gag and choke on his cock, an effort that only seems to quicken his release.
What feels like an eternity is, in truth, only a few minutes before he finally pulls back after spilling himself down my throat, leaving me coughing and shaking.
Nausea surges so violently I think for one terrible second I might be sick where I sit. My whole body shakes with the effort of staying upright, of staying conscious, of not giving the men around me one more thing to enjoy.
The smoker adjusts his clothes as if this is nothing. As if I am nothing.
From near the stove, the boss lets out a low sound of approval.
“Good. You will swallow every drop,” he says.
The words are spoken with such calm satisfaction that they hollow the room out worse than shouting ever could.
I bend forward as far as the ropes allow, coughing, trembling, every breath raw now. The lantern hums softly. Someone in the room laughs under his breath. The boss does not move. He only watches, patient and pleased, as though the point has never been the act itself but the wreckage left behind.
I barely catch a breath before another shadow steps into the space the smoker leaves behind. Broader through the shoulders, quieter, but no less certain. The second man. The room seems to contract around me all over again.
He doesn’t speak.
That is worse.
He moves in with grim efficiency, cutting the rope that holds me to the chair back and hauling me upright before my body is ready to obey.
Pain rips through my raw wrists as the shift sends hot needles of sensation down both arms. My knees buckle instantly, but he catches me hard by the upper arm, fingers biting deep enough to bruise.
For one wild second I think of running.
His grip tightens, and the thought dies where it is born.
He drags me the short distance to the table with brutal certainty, not fast, not frantic, but like he knows exactly how little strength I have left.
The lantern light swings across the room in sick yellow streaks.
My boots scrape uselessly against the floorboards.
I try to twist free and earn a vicious jerk that nearly tears my shoulder again.
My hip strikes the table first.
Pain flashes white.
He forces me down against the scarred wood with one hand between my shoulder blades. The surface is rough beneath my cheek, smelling of mildew, old ash, and damp rot. I push up on instinct, and he slams me flat again, harder this time.
“Stay down,” he mutters.
I fight anyway.
Not because I think I can overpower him. Because there is still something in me that refuses to go still when ordered.
I lash backward with one heel and catch only air.
His hand tangles in my hair at once, wrenching my head sideways until tears spring hot and useless to my eyes.
My breath comes ragged against the tabletop.
One wrist is seized, then the other, forced together behind my back with rough, punishing precision.
Across the room, the boss says nothing.
He only watches.