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T he chain rattles as I drag it across the tile, scuffing a pathway over the piddly number of square feet I’m forced to exist in now.

Five, ten, a hundred-thousand paces—a chant pounding in my head with every step.

What. The. Fuck.

Clank, clank, clank.

What. The. Fuck.

I’ve officially lost my damn mind.

Isaac, he called me.

Isaac.

Me.

Time blurs. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. How long I’ve been pacing. Back and forth.

Back

and

forth.

My ankle nearly gives out, but I keep going until my walk turns into a pathetic sort of hobble. My muscles itch with the need to run several miles, injuries be damned. My brain can’t process when I’m just sitting around like a useless asshole.

So, I hobble some more. Back and forth.

Trapped.

Trapped and alone.

This place has turned me into the proverbial caged tiger, and I swear I’m going to rip my motherfucking keeper’s throat out the next time he gets within my line of sight.

Fifty thousand laps around my room—more, or less, I don’t know—and I keep rehashing everything he said. My name, the details of the night my sister disappeared, the desperate sounds Everly made as he was dragging her away…

But first, she said my name.

I wonder if Sara called my name. Called and called, and I never came.

Like an adder, my hand strikes out, slamming into the wall.

“ Fuck .”

There’s no response from the other side. Hasn’t been all day.

Hoisting the chain to shoulder level, I hurl it at the wall, cursing the monster who’s keeping us here, the loss of everything that matters, and my miserable fucking existence.

The chain clunks harmlessly to the ground. So, I do it again.

And again.

That blank white barrier taunts me.

I lift a hand and place it there. Bruises are already beginning to color the side. I’m not sure how long I beat on that wall, the names I called him, or what I threatened. But I remember the sound she made when I stopped.

If it weren’t for Everly’s ominous tales of impenetrable reinforcements, I might bust my way through. After all, it’s thin enough to carry on a damn conversation, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve punched a hole in a wall. But the fact is, we don’t know what’s between these harmless looking slabs, and the possibility of another injury wouldn’t help my escape mission.

And if I were to break through…then what?

A vision materializes: me, stretched to the limit of my chain, snatching her away from that purple-suited bastard and perching on the mattress while I hold her above my head. Out of reach.

My own doomed version of King-Kong and Fay Wray.

Me and Beverly without the B.

Normally, that would amuse me, but nothing is fucking funny right now, and anything I might have tried would have only made things worse. Everly told me about one of the men who did his best to tear down the wall. He got nowhere.

Spoiler alert: he’s dead now.

I guess that can be said for everyone, though. Except her. She seems to be the only one exempt from an untimely death in this hellhole, and that’s only because she’s got her own special nightmare going on.

He’s not going to hurt her. You don’t keep a person alive for two years, only to kill them for the sake of a temper tantrum.

She’s worth too much.

More than Sara, apparently. My head nearly exploded when he said that about her.

“She ended up being useless to me.”

My chest seizes.

Everything I thought I understood was flipped on its head in the span of minutes, and I’ve got no idea what is happening anymore.

He called me Isaac, not Nick.

Isaac, the detective who was investigating a rash of serial disappearances.

Isaac, whose younger sister was waiting for him to pick her up the night she disappeared from in front of the coffee shop, where she’d been playing a gig that evening.

She was here .

And now she’s gone.

My breaths are shallow, uneven rasps. Splinters in my side. Spots swim in front of my eyes. It’s not until I begin to sway that I realize I’m hyperventilating. On the edge of passing out.

I lean forward until my forehead rests on the wall. My breathing slows, but my thoughts keep spinning.

Spin, spin, spin. Like a whirlpool bent on taking me under.

He knows.

That motherfucking kidnapping, human trafficking, murderer knows who I am. And I don’t know what that means.

I don’t know… I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t

fucking

know.

There’s only one thing I do know. One thing I swear to this wall, to Sara, and to the girl who is no longer chattering a mile a minute from the room next door.

I’m going to kill this bastard.

I’m going to kill him for all of us.