4. Jasmine
four
Jasmine
Iwoke with my head full of cotton and a taste in my mouth like I’d just licked the inside of a dead car battery.
The air was cold, dry as a bone, and had that metallic afterburn you got in old bomb shelters or the kind of basement where people went to disappear.
My back pressed up against rough gray wool, cot-width, barely long enough for my legs.
I was in a box, and not the metaphorical kind.
I was dressed, minus my boots and rings, no phone bulge in my pocket.
My tongue was fat, every swallow bringing up a shot-glass of nausea and the kind of headache they write warning labels about.
I turned my head slowly to avoid spinning the room.
The world beyond the cot was lined by steel bars, square and heavy, set deep into the concrete floor.
A cell. I wrapped both hands around the nearest bar and squeezed, just to make sure this wasn’t some painkiller hallucination.
The metal didn’t budge, and my knuckles ached with the certainty of it.
A fluorescent tube sputtered above, caged behind a wire grate, the only light in a ceiling built for men with a crawlspace kink.
The walls were concrete block, painted the color of wet clay.
Nothing but more cages in both directions, maybe eight in all.
The far wall was lost in gloom. In the cell right across the corridor, a woman in a green thermal shirt lay curled up with her back to me, knees up, hands tucked like a child bracing for the world to fall apart.
One cell down, another woman. Another. Each locked up in her own little coffin with just enough space to pace out a panic attack.
Most of the bunks were occupied, the bodies curled and bunched in defensive postures.
Not asleep, exactly—just dormant, the way animals get when they know fighting is a waste of calories.
I scanned down the row, counting: seven other women, none of them looking at me, except for one in the cell directly next to mine.
She sat cross-legged on her cot, dark hair hanging down in thick ropes, watching me with the flat interest of a crow perched on a fence.
My hands still locked around the bars, I gave them a shake, more out of reflex than hope.
The bars made zero noise, fitted so tight you could floss with the seam.
The padlock was a thick, double-bolted bastard, keyed, not combo.
No tool marks. No wiggle. I pressed my tongue to the split in my lip, found only dried blood.
I ran my hands over my face, down my shirt, checking for cuts or bruises.
Nothing major, nothing that bled. I still wore my jeans, my belt, even the sports bra I’d pulled on that morning.
Whoever did this wanted me functional, just not mobile.
My wrists had faint red rings, but the skin wasn’t broken.
Some kind of restraint, maybe. No taste of chloroform.
Probably a needle. Didn’t matter; I was awake now.
I slid to the edge of the cot and locked eyes with the woman in the next cell over. She blinked, like she’d already seen this movie three times and hated the ending. I liked her on principle.
I cleared my throat. “Anyone want to fill me in on what the fuck happened?”
The woman with the braids didn’t answer, but the one on the end—the one who hadn’t moved since I came to—raised her head and said, voice thin but not scared, “You’re in the fun house now, babe.”
I let that hang, then leaned into the bars, elbows locked. “Cute. Any chance there’s a better answer?”
The woman in the next cell finally spoke. “There’s only one answer, and it’s not better.” She sounded mid-thirties, voice smoked and sanded down to nothing extra. She had the accent you picked up in every small western town between Winslow and the California line.
“Name’s Eve,” she said. “You’re the seventh.”
I sized her up. Pale skin, dark eyes, the kind of stare that held until you blinked first. She was barefoot, one knee jiggling. There was a scar on her chin and a chipped tooth, but everything else about her looked whole.
“Jasmine,” I said, not offering a hand because, well, bars.
She nodded like she already knew. “You want the real story, or the pretty one?”
“Real,” I said. “And fast.”
Eve shot a look down the row, then back.
“We’re in a bunker somewhere north of Kingman.
Cement walls all the way. No doors out except the one at the end.
It’s got a keypad and a lock. The man who runs it comes by twice a day.
He calls himself Adam.” She let that settle, watching me for any sign I was going to freak out.
I didn’t.
“How long have you been here?” I said.
She looked up at the flickering bulb, counting something I couldn’t see. “Seven months. They keep us fed. We get showers twice a week. Some days there’s a book or a deck of cards. He talks to us. Never the same conversation twice, but never really different, either.”
I closed my eyes for a second, listening to the blood pulse in my ears. “Anyone ever get out?”
Eve’s face didn’t change. “He let one go. We never saw her again. He said she ‘learned to live with herself’ and didn’t need us anymore.”
A cold chill went down my back. “So we’re what? Some sick collection?”
She shrugged. “Sort of. He’s never hurt us or yelled at us. He likes to talk. Sometimes for hours. Then he leaves.”
I tried to run the logic. No ransom, no threat, no humiliation. Just captivity for the sake of it. “What does he want?”
Eve picked at a thread in her pajama pants. “I think he wants family. Or maybe worship. Maybe both.”
That was worse than sexual, in my book.
“Where’d he take my boots?”
She barked a tiny laugh. “Everybody asks that. No shoes, no laces. No rings, no sharp edges. You’ll get slippers if you behave.”
I gripped the bars and felt my jaw working. The other women had started listening, even the ones pretending to sleep.
“He wants you for sex,” I said.
Eve giggled. “All the time.”
“And you just let him?”
She nodded. “Of Course. Why wouldn’t I?”
I raised my voice. “Anybody here got a name that’s not Eve?”
One by one, they responded. “Cynthia.” “Ashley.” “Lina.” “Molly.” They offered the names without hope, like they were saying them for the last time. I tried to memorize the order, then counted: Eight cells, eight names.
I turned back to Eve. “No one’s tried to jump him?”
Her face finally changed—a ghost of a smile. “All of us, at least once. I tried to shank him with a plastic spoon. Molly kicked his knee so hard he limped for a week. He always wins. And he never punishes. He just waits it out.”
It was the “never punishes” that chilled me most. Men like that didn’t care about power, just inevitability.
The next question stuck in my throat, but I pushed it out. “What happens if we stop eating? Stop cooperating?”
Eve looked at me sideways, her eyes hard now. “He’s patient. He’ll let you starve if that’s what you want. Then he’ll carry you out, and you’ll wake up in a hospital bed with a feeding tube. And then you’ll be back here, still alive, and he’ll start the talk again like nothing happened.”
My hands hurt from gripping the bars. I forced myself to let go, to unclench.
“You planning to wait him out?” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m planning to watch for his mistake. I just don’t know if he makes them.”
I sat on the edge of the cot, hunched over, running every possible scenario. The urge to scream was strong, but I knew it would be wasted in this room.
I looked up at Eve and asked, “He ever bring in two new girls in a row?”
She thought for a second, then shook her head. “Never more than one at a time. He likes to introduce us. Like a weird dinner party.”
I nodded, a sick realization settling in. “He wants a collection.”
Eve didn’t disagree. She just locked her eyes on the end door, lips pressed together.
My mouth was bone dry. “Has he ever told you his last name?”
“Calls himself Adam E,” she said. “No more than that. Sometimes he says we’re the only people who matter.”
The light above me buzzed, flickered, but didn’t go out.
I pressed my forehead to the bars, searching for hairline cracks or flaws in the metal. Nothing. The floor was a single slab, no tiles or seams. The shelf by my cot had a plastic cup and a book, some battered thriller. I checked the spine for a title, then dropped it back.
The other women watched, some covert, some direct. Nobody here was soft, not after seven months.
I glanced back at Eve. “He ever get mad?”
She met my eyes. “Only once. Cynthia threw piss in his face. He just stared at her until she cried. That was it.”
My insides twisted. “Fuck.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s that kind of story.”
The silence hung, heavy and final, broken only by the distant hum of the overhead light.
I sat back, considering everything—door, lock, floor, every woman’s face. I was not going to die in this box, not for some asshole’s fantasy of family.
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. I started planning, then and there, and promised myself I’d never stop.
The door at the far end opened with a hiss, not a slam, and the man who walked in was the only person I’d ever seen who looked less out of place in a human kennel than the concrete itself.
He was tall, solid, the kind of body that made you think of old football highlight reels, but there was zero fat, not even in his face.
Forty, maybe a hard forty-two, with shoulders that did most of the talking and a smile so even it had to be from practice, not birth.
His hair was longish, black streaked with gray, and his eyes were such a pale green they looked like a trick of the light.
Jeans, gray T-shirt, boots that looked custom but not new.
He moved with that slow, loose energy you saw in surfers and morticians—no urgency, not even when the door clanged shut behind him.