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H e’s back. I hear the twinkling clank of his weapons, even if his footsteps sound different, lighter and slower. He also doesn’t call out like he’s done the last six times, that mocking, Honey, I’m home! right before the padlock clicks open.

I slide back on the cot, clenching my teeth so I don’t cry out as pain shoots up from the deep, gouging wound in my thigh. He rattles around out there, although it sounds different. There’s no click of the padlock sliding open. Instead, I hear a snap that reminds me of the sound of a broken bone.

“Please,” I whisper, squeezing my eyes shut. “Please, let it be fast.” I don’t know who I’m praying to. Certainly not God, who clearly doesn’t care about a whore like me.

The door scrapes open. I force myself to look at him because if I don’t, it will be so much worse.

But it isn’t him.

It’s a woman.

She’s the kind of woman who looks elegant on the surface but will attack you with a kind of viciousness not even the meanest of working girls can conjure up. The kind of woman who blames you because her husband paid fifty bucks for a blowjob and a fuck in a shabby motel, who’ll do anything in her power to see you destroyed just for trying to make a living.

She steps into the cell, and my whole body freezes. She’s holding something that looks like one of his weapons, letting it dangle at her side, beside her sleek dark slacks. She tilts her head a little, taking me in.

“Did my husband do this to you?”

I stare at her, not sure how to respond. This has to be a trap. One of his cruel little games.

“He’s not here,” she adds.

I swallow, my throat dry. I have water, sort of—he left a ceramic saucer underneath a pipe that drips with condensation. But it tastes metallic and stale, and I try not to drink too much of it, not in the three days I’ve been here.

I think it’s been three days, anyway.

“Who are you?” The question comes out shaky, my voice still raspy from screaming.

“My name is Judith Vale. Did my husband do this to you?” This time, when she asks the question, I hear the viciousness I’d expect from such a privileged woman. She spits the question out, as sharp as a knife. Curls her fingers more tightly around the weapon she carries. If it even is a weapon—I can’t see a blade.

“Probably,” I spit back at her, like we’re talking about a john and not a psychopath. “I don’t know who your fucking husband is.”

“He’s blond,” Judith says smoothly. “With grey eyes. A brown mustache. Only a few inches taller than me.”

It’s him, of course. His face and his stupid caterpillar mustache are seared into my nightmares.

“What if he is?” I shoot back at her. “What are you going to do about it?”

Something flashes across Judith’s face. A smile? Fear wraps around in my belly, and I try to push back on the cot. Not that I can move much, not with the chain around my legs and the cut in my thigh.

Judith takes a few more steps into the cell, moving with a slow and easy grace, like she’s not shocked at all to discover that her husband keeps women locked up in his basement. She sweeps her gaze around, taking in the surroundings that have been my entire existence for the past three days. The cold metal walls, the bloodstains, the pile of old bones in the corner.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Judith looks over at me and lifts the thing she’s holding. It looks like a pair of gardening shears. “However, I’m not going to call the police.”

“You’re going to leave me here.” My voice sounds flat. “Let him have his fun.”

“No.” She glides over to the cot and sinks down on it as if she doesn’t even care that it’s covered in filth. She puts the garden shears in her lap. “Of course not.”

“You’re going to kill me yourself, then?” I stare at her, willing the tremor out of my voice.

She shakes her head. “I’m going to cut those chains. But—” Her eyes fix on mine, piercing me with the cruelty of a wealthy, jaded wife. “I’ll take you into the house. Tend to that wound.” She tilts her head toward my leg. “I assume my husband did it to you? What did he use?”

I laugh, sharp and hysterical. This can’t be happening. I can’t be having this fucking conversation. “I wasn’t exactly paying attention,” I say. “He was fucking me at the time and the next thing I know there’s blood everywhere.”

Judith blanches when I say fucking , although she composes herself quickly. “I see. I assume it was one of the hunting knives. Hopefully, it wasn’t too deep.” She leans closer and sniffs. “It doesn’t smell infected.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I wish I could crawl away from her. Wish her husband hadn’t put me in these chains so I could run out of this nightmare. “Are you going to get me out of here or not?”

Judith fixes me with that piercing gaze again, and I feel another wobble of fear. “I’m going to take you into my house. My husband, as I said, is gone. He’ll be gone for a week. That will give us time to prepare.”

“Or you can fucking let me go!” I shriek and thrash against my chains, something I haven’t bothered doing since he beat me for it, dragging me out of the cell and into the main room where he thrashed me with a cat-o’-nine-tails tipped with wire. Judith thinks the cut on my leg is bad; she hasn’t even seen my back.

Judith watches me, her gaze steady. I keep shrieking wordlessly and pushing back against my chains and my body screams in protest. I can feel all the cuts her husband made opening up again, turning to hot slick blood against the slinky, see-through negligee he forces me to wear.

I cry out, in pain this time, and slump back. Judith places a hand, very gingerly, on my calf, just above where the chains have left me bruised and aching. “You shouldn’t do that,” she says. “You’re making things worse.”

“ You’re making things worse!” I shout, my words jagged with sobs.

Judith sighs, her shoulders hitching a little. “We’re very isolated,” she says, still unnerving me. “And a snowstorm is on its way, if it’s not already here.”

I stare at her, dread tightening a noose around my throat. She’s lying .

But what if she isn’t?

“We won’t be able to drive into town,” she continues. “The doctor won’t be able to visit. And I prefer not to involve the police.”

I laugh sharply. “Why the hell not? The police might actually listen to you.”

Judith takes her hand off my calf, and my skin feels strangely cool. She stands, opens the garden shears, and lines them up with the chain. “They probably would,” she says, snapping the shears shut. They slice right through the chain, and I realize they aren’t garden shears at all. “But they won’t handle this matter to my satisfaction.”

She cuts another link of the chain with a clean, expert efficiency. The links fall away. I stare at her, trembling. I don’t know if I should be afraid of her or not.

“And surely—” She makes one final cut on the chain, right above the big padlock. I know that I’m free, but I don’t move. Not when she looks me straight in the eye and smiles prettily and says,

“Surely you’d like some revenge for what my husband did to you?”