Page 15

Was this really her future?

The idea was almost too horrible to process, but once it had appeared in her head it wouldn’t be quiet. It coiled in the center of her mind, a dangerous viper with icy blades for fangs, hissing, waiting. Waiting for her to accept this nightmare as reality. Her reality.

She didn’t want to accept anything. Beth wanted to rage, to rip the chain from the floor — not like she hadn’t tried — but it was all so useless.

The man was so much stronger than her, and colder than the water pooled around her.

It had been ridiculously easy for him to push her through the house with his fingers wrapped around the back of the collar. Pulling it flush to her throat, tightening it as she prepared for his promised punishment. With the metal of the knife still fresh on her tongue, Beth hadn’t even tried to fight. She had let him haul her into this room. Let him push her to her knees. Watched like a sacrificial lamb as he’d gathered chain from a metal table and tethered her to the bracket embedded in the concrete.

She had expected violence. Expected him to hit her, or at the very least to shout at her.

He had done nothing.

Turning around in his polished shoes he had walked out of the room, the heavy door shutting with a loud clap, and she’d been alone.

The concrete had bruised her limbs, made her hips ache, and she had thought she felt cold. But last night was nothing compared to this.

Her bones ached, each shiver making them jerk against stiff muscles and tendons, and she almost laughed at the bitter idea that cold was used to make pain stop. Cold hurt worse than any volleyball injury in high school or college, hurt worse than the time she’d been rear-ended at a stoplight — it was nothing but hurt. Pinpricks of fire as her nerves sparked in desperation, and then the deep, shuddering ache that followed every bout of shivers. The foolish, automatic response of her body trying to keep her alive.

It would be wiser to die before he came back.

Beth sniffled, curled tighter as the thought burrowed close to the viper that promised a future more hellish than even this. Torture, rape… or death.

Are those really my only options?

Being rescued, the idea of police bursting in to help her,

that seemed far away. Too impossible to hope for. The warm tracks of tears across the bridge of her nose were the only way she realized she was crying, too cold to make noise, too distracted by the weak shudders of her body to focus on her hitched breaths.

None of it mattered a second later when the pop of the electric current turning on reminded her of just how much pain she could be in. A scream tried to escape her lips just before her head cracked against the concrete floor, vision turning white as every inch of her body went rigid, agony coursing along her nerves like they were open wounds. Salted and burning. It felt like it lasted forever, lungs trapped around too little air, and then the buzzing ended and she went limp. Water lolling back and forth around her, tiny waves on the ocean of her ruin.

As her eyes regained focus, flickering on and off like a cheap movie reel, she saw him.

Standing over her, head tilted to the side, upside down from her point of view. Dark hair cut so that it laid perfectly, not a strand out of place, and those cold blue eyes that held no human emotion to speak of — he was simply watching her. Gaze drifting down her body as she tried to pull air back into her lungs, too weak to even try and shield her nakedness.

Not like any of it mattered.

He’d seen everything.

And he didn’t even seem interested. It wasn’t lust she saw in his face, it wasn’t hate, or rage, or hunger, or joy — it was nothing. An absolute emptiness behind a face that could have been attractive on someone with a soul.

His silence grated like sandpaper on her frayed nerves, the cold returning as her body abandoned the memory of the shock and let the icy water creep back into her perception. A shiver shook her again, teeth clattering loudly in the quiet, broken again by the soft splash of the water as she managed to bend one leg against the other to try and block the view between her thighs.

There were five cameras.

One at the center of each wall, and a final straight above the bracket in the floor.

Whatever assholes sat on the other side of those glass eyes had seen everything as well, but she didn’t have to gift it to them. Not if she could avoid it.

The man hadn’t moved, had barely breathed from what she could tell. An automaton. A shell of a person in fine clothes. “What do you want from me?” she croaked, voice cracking.

Weak. So weak.

“Everything,” he answered, taking a step, and then another, until he stood beside her hip and she could see him clearly. Still in his big rubber boots, his protection from the electric current he tormented her with. “We’ve already had that discussion. Now is when you decide if you’d like to start being obedient.”

It was so tempting to curse him, to damn him again. To rage against everything he’d already done to her — but it was the threat of what he would do that kept her silent.

“Well?” he asked.