Page 15 of The Enslaved Duet

They fed me every two days. Bread and cold ham someone slapped onto a plate that appeared sporadically when I woke up. I’d never eaten so little or been so distressed by it, not even during my days battling an eating disorder.

There was water too. Dirty and warm poured into a porcelain bowl at the very edge of the circumference of space the chain allowed me. There was never enough, a shallow pool that barely slacked my wicked thirst.

It was clever.

I was restless from lack of movement, hungry to the point of constant pain, and near delirium.

They’d closed the shutters over the massive windows and turned down the heat so that I could see my breath cloud in the wintry air as I curled in on myself, shivering in misery and unable to sleep comfortably.

I had the use of a bucket as a toilet and, thank God for small mercies, it was regularly emptied whenever I managed to get a few hours of shut-eye.

Two weeks.

I wasn’t sure if that was commendable or stupid. All I needed to do was give into my new reality, and I’d be free of this gilded chamber of horrors, free to eat real food and drink more than tepid water.

Free to be me again.

I was locked in the dark, but it was more than an absence of light. It was the blackness of my own solitude; the quantum hole at the center of my soul that was slowly sucking away at everything that made meme.

I tried to write an encyclopedia of Cosima facts to cement my sense of self in the chaos of night that had become my life.

Cosima Ruth Lombardi.

Born August 24th, 1998 in Napoli, Italia to Caprice Maria Lombardi and Seamus Patrick Moore.

My favourite colour was wine red, captured in a glass and held over rich, warm candlelight.

I loved poppies best, of all flowers, because they reminded me of me in a way that was narcissistic but true. They were bold as blood but stark against the softer colours of the traditional Italian countryside. They demanded notice and received it. But their beauty was short-lived and fragile as the thin silk of their petals fell to bits within a week and scattered on the wind.

I felt very much like one of those black-centered blooms, falling apart with every breath I took without even one witness to my dematerialization.

He wanted me like this.

Lost like decaying particles in a petri dish.

I didn’t have to hear his British accent clipping the words into neat little explanations to understand why.

He wanted me broken.

A beautiful, hollow shell to break open and fuck into.

It wasn’t enough to own my person and rape my body. He wanted to empty my soul so that the only thing I was filled with was his cock and his cum.

His words from days ago broke into the blackness of my world and shone blindingly bright.

“When I drive into that virgin cunt and smear your blood on my cock, you’ll cry. Not because I’m hurting you, even though I am. No, you’ll cry because you are going to be soempty, so useless that you’ll beg and sob to be filled by something. And that something will be me, Cosima. My fingers in your asshole, my thick cock in your spasming cunt, my tongue in your mouth, and your soul crushed right under my heel as I fuck up into you and you cry out the name of your Master.”

He visited me frequently, hovering in the doorway, a black smudge against the bright hope of light spilling in from the hall beyond. There was always silence while he observed me curled into varying positions like a hermit crab without its shell, pathetically naked and fundamentally vulnerable.

Then his voice would come, smooth as velvet but violent, a ribbon tied too tight around my throat.

“Are you ready to kneel and greet your Master?”

The words played throughout my head like an infinite echo long after I’d rejected him with spitting words or frozen silence.

They taunted me.

I didn’t want to kneel for anyone, to rely on my beauty and my body to get me out of yet another bind, but my choices were non-existent, and my spirit was cracking right down the middle.