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“I tried, but it hurts too much.”

“How about you get on my back and I can carry you to your place?”

“You’ll do that?”

“Well, yeah. I’m not leaving you here. You’re hurt.”

“He lied. He told me you’re selfish and mean.”

Wait, what? Before I can ask her who he is, a cloth is placed over my nose and mouth. The little girl opens her mouth. Her mouth moves but nothing comes out. Her face is a haze. A bone-deep weariness blankets my body, and I close my eyes, barely feeling the needle in my arm.

My nightmares have just begun.

* * *

“No, please. Please don’t put me in there.”

My words are slurred. He’s doped me up.

“You are stubborn. You are defiant. You’ve mouthed off to me one too many times, doll, and I am fucking tired of it.”

He sets me inside the coffin, naked. My skin rubs against the corpse’s skin. Her body is decomposed. Her face is a slimy mess beneath the veil of long jet-ink strands. Is there a reason he concealed his sister’s face from me? Is he afraid in death, she’ll judge him to be a monster? Because that is how I see my kidnapper.

“This will teach you a lesson. You are not my equal; you are beneath me. You do not walk alongside me; you walk behind me.”

“The ransom—”

“Is none of your concern.”

He puts an oxygen face mask on me and then puts the canister of oxygen between mine and the corpse’s legs. She and I are the same height and build. He turns the oxygen on, moves the lid over the coffin, and hammers the nails into the wood.

I am shrouded in darkness, skin on skin to someone who has been dead for weeks. I smell her stench through the oxygen mask, and gagging, I will myself to get past the smell of rotting flesh; otherwise, I’ll throw up in my mask. I have to live through his lesson for me. If I do, I’ll get my freedom. That’s my hope.

Through my haze of being drugged up, I heard my kidnapper speaking to my rescuers. My grandfather is willing to pay the five million dollars my kidnapper is demanding. Five million dollars for freedom I took for granted. How will I face my family after they hear of my humiliation at the hands of my kidnapper?

Unless I don’t talk at all. I’ll tell them and the authorities the minimum. If my grandfather suggests I go to therapy, I’ll refuse.

I will bear the weight of my humiliation alone, having put myself in this situation. I should have listened to my grandfather and my cousins, that every time I snuck out of my family’s estate, I was in danger of being kidnapped.

It sucks to be a Lexington. It’s horrible to be born with two-color eyes. I’m a freak of nature. A free spirit who shouldn’t have rebelled. I should have stayed within the walls of my grandfather’s place. I should have listened to my older, wiser cousin, Roman.

Instead, I didn’t listen, and this darkness, this aloneness, is my just punishment. Inside the coffin, there is the hissing of the oxygen. I lie still and clasp my hands over my chest. Her skin beneath mine moves, and I squeeze my eyes shut, my heart beating a mile a minute against my ribcage.

The coffin lurches forward. My skin slides over her skin. Her skin peels off her bones and sticks to my skin. Bile rises in my throat. The coffin moves faster, like it’s being pulled across the wooden floor of his house, out the door, and onto the field in the back of his farm. The coffin jostles, and more of her skin comes off her body and clings to mine. Then there isn’t movement forward. Instead, there is movement downward.

Oh, God, oh, God, he is going back on his word. He doesn’t intend on taking the ransom and giving me my freedom. He intends on burying me alive. I’m going to die. No one will know where I’m buried. I’ll die alone. I didn’t get the chance to tell my family I love them.

I love them.

I love my family.

I pound on the lid. Pound on it until my palms throb.

“Let me out. Let me out, dammit. Please. Oh, God, please.”

He doesn’t listen. He leaves me like that until the oxygen stops hissing. The coffin is pulled from out of the ground, and when he removes the lid, his face is covered with a black mask, as usual. Only his eyes are visible.

My kidnapper removes the oxygen canister from between my legs and replaces it with another before nailing the lid back on. I am lowered back into the ground. The corpse’s ribs poke into my back. He removes and replaces the canister a few more times, and soon, I lose track of time.

I don’t see the light of day until my rescuers unearth me from the ground.