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Beth hated the concrete room. Despised it. He called it the punishment room, but that wasn’t it. The shit he was doing to her wasn’t punishment, it was torture. From the first night he’d put her in there, she had known it was a room meant for terrible things, but the cold, the water, the chain, and the fucking shocks were only the beginning.

She had seen the metal fixtures on the walls and ceiling that night, but she’d refused to dwell on them.

Now, she knew first-hand what many of them were for.

The ones in the ceiling let him attach hooks that he could loop rope onto, winding it over her limbs in intricate patterns until she was finally lifted completely off the floor. Held up like an insect in a painful web where bulging knots dug into delicate flesh, where muscles cramped, where the cold sank deep with no opportunity to escape from it. To escape from him.

More a spider than a person.

It was an apt description.

Today was the second time he’d strung her up like that, and today she hadn’t fought him. All he’d had to do was show her the little zapping baton and she had knelt gracelessly on the cold concrete, eyes down.

What are you supposed to call me?

His voice was inside her. Echoing in her thoughts like ghosts wandering an empty house, and she wanted him out. Exorcised. Wanted to be free of him, but just when she would manage to focus on something else — a song, a story, a memory — he would appear. Like he could feel when she was escaping from his influence. He would hurt her, rape her, and then speak to her in that infuriatingly calm tone.

What do you say, slave?

Everything was inverted. How many times had she said ‘thank you’ for the things he’d done to her? How many times had he demanded she finish the gratitude properly? And then how many times had he hurt her again to punish her?

No. It was torture. Not punishment.

This was as much psychological as it was physical. Beth still had enough sense of reality to know that. Even when her world had narrowed to the concrete room, the empty hallway, and the pretty bedroom with all its own horrors… she knew what he was doing. Trying to condition her to follow his ridiculous poster of rules.

She wouldn’t follow them. At least, not all of them.

She was still a person. Still real.

But two things had become clear in her time with him. The bedroom was his version of a reward — a soft bed, sheets, a bathroom. The concrete one was punishment — cold, discomfort, and only a drain when she needed to relieve herself.

But in both places he hurt her.

He had taken her against the concrete floor just as viciously as he’d taken her in the bed on the first night. Had chained her to concrete walls just as effectively as he’d bound her to wooden bedposts.

You will learn to crave this.

Another echo of his voice in her head, and she covered her ears like she could block it out. Twisting in the sheets, she buried her face in the pillow, still waiting for him to return.

This was just a new game for him.

r /> Taking her down from the ropes? Feeding her warm soup and cold juice? Bringing her to this room and telling her to sleep? It wasn’t real. She had never apologized for ripping all of the terrifying things from the walls in this room, for tearing his poster to pieces with the aid of some of those things. Had never expressed regret for pulling apart his cabinet of tools and dildos and gags and cuffs.

And that meant this room could not be a reward.

It was just a different vista for her torture.

He had cleaned up the room. Put everything back in its place. Replaced the poster with a pristine one. Erased the violence of the morning like it had never existed. She had wanted to destroy it all, but even the broken drawers were somehow back in the cabinet. It was a false sheen of perfection, just like his suits. And just like him… underneath the pretty veneer it was all rotting. Corrupted. Evil.

This is not a reward, she reminded herself. Said it again, and again, and again in her mind so that the softness of the mattress wouldn’t lull her into comfort.

Not like the reminder was necessary, Beth was terrified to sleep. Terrified she might wake up to a new horror, a fresh creation from his devious mind as he tried his best to make her obedient. To make her a thing.

Turning over again, she focused on the pale light spilling from the open bathroom door. He had turned off all of the lights when he had left her on the bed, pulling the sheets over her as if he were tucking her in, but as soon as the door had closed she had walked to it. Tested the handle and found it locked. Always locked. So, she had turned on the bathroom light, angled the door so she could see, and crawled back under the sheets.

The glinting glass from the cameras caught the light, but they had faded into the background of her mind. If she thought too much about them she would worry again about how comfortable she had grown in her nakedness — so she didn’t.

She refused to think about them and the faceless monsters behind them.