Page 68 of His Toy

The screens hummed. Donna was asleep in bed. Grant was doing push-ups in his room. The fireplace room was empty and dark. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I checked the drawers. The first few had pens, a few pads of paper. The next was empty. But the third had the same key he had shown me, the key to the collar.

Another key, an ordinary one, lay next to it.

I pocketed the key, and quietly let myself out of the house through the sliding glass door. There was a soft blue glow on the trees, making the atmosphere seem dreamy. My path through the grass was loud compared to the morning silence, my footsteps interrupting the flow of dawn.

It was an ordinary morning. Nothing had changed. It would be all right.

At the hatch, I tried the key, hoping that it would work, that I would unlock it and find nothing but another room full of whips. A playful fantasy. Nothing like Hazel’s nightmare. And part of me hoped that it wouldn’t work, that the key was a dead end, that I would never find out what was in there. That Hazel couldn’t say I was wrong about Zaid.

The lock clicked into place. I lifted the handle. A ladder was dimly lit by the morning light, leading into darkness.

Darkness didn’t mean he was evil. It just meant I needed to find the light.

A cough sounded, echoing up to me. My heart raced in my chest. Had I imagined that?

“Hello?” I asked. “Is anyone down there?”

“Help us!” a woman’s voice cried. “You’ve got to help us!”

A chorus of screams and shouts and cries echoed up. I set down on the ladder, my fingers trembling, tracing the walls with my hands, looking for a switch.

“To the left!” someone shouted. I found it, and the lights came on, illuminating a large space, filled with individual cells, thick bars with mesh between them. At least twenty people were in the different cages with chains around their necks and limbs, straining against the metal. I couldn’t move. Had he kept them here this entire time?

Then Hazel’s words swallowed me whole:Eric did horrible things to us, things I never want to think of ever again. But Zaid did too.

Zaid did too. His revenge. These were Eric’s followers.

I couldn’t fathom hating someone so badly that you had to torture anyone who came into contact with that enemy. As far as I knew, these people had done nothing to Zaid. They had simply existed, and led a life in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even if they had done Eric’s awful bidding, they were still people. People like my sister. People like me.

Hazel was right.

I blinked the tears out of my eyes and tried desperately to make sense of the room, of the way it was built. But I saw no control panels, no switches besides the one light. Nothing. Zaid’s home was intricate and full of secrets. This room was no exception.

A woman with short black hair crouched in the corner of her cell, beside her metal toilet. She shivered, and when she looked up at me, her eyes were bloodshot. Weak. I wanted to cry for her. She didn’t deserve this.

“I swear, I’ll make this right,” I shouted, but my words were drowned out by their cries. I switched the light off. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, as I climbed. In the darkness, they screamed and screamed, and I knew I would never forget seeing those people who had been there all along. While I hiked in the woods, these people had lived in the darkness. In cages. With no way out.

I took a deep breath, looking in the direction of the house. Before I did anything, I had to guarantee Hazel’s safety. I didn’t think about my own safety because I knew, deep down, Zaid wouldn’t hurt me. Even if he was an evil fucking monster, he stuck to his word. But if that wasn’t true and I was wrong about him again, then I would risk my life for them, for Hazel. I had to help them somehow. I had to renegotiate with Zaid.

I closed the hatch. The wooden door, sealed by metal, in the middle of the woods, looked like it could be anything. I had hoped Hazel would be wrong, that it was a silly made-up story to tell between sisters. To escape the boredom. But this? This was so much worse. It made it feel like everything I had known in this place was a bad dream. A fucking nightmare.

Zaid had lied.