Page 8 of The Fix

The two monsters were done with their dinner. She heard them both ascending the stairs.

Cami said a silent prayer and then flashed the light one more time, the sounds of footsteps just around the corner.

She brought her feet down, intending on hiding the mirror under the blanket at the foot of the bed, but she moved too quickly and when she let go of the compact, it went sliding over the edge of the bed near the wall, landing noiselessly on the carpet. Shit!

Exhausted, she loosened her muscles and lay back.

“I gotta piss,” Trig said. “They probably do too. Should we take our pretty friends to the ladies’ room or what?”

“The little one in there didn’t bother to ask,” she heard AJ say.

“She just wet the bed. Low-key, a turnoff, but I can get over it.” He laughed.

It sounded loose, like the alcohol had made him fuzzy.

Oh, Elle. Her poor, innocent, sensitive sister was so petrified she’d wet the bed.

Or maybe she just couldn’t hold it. A lump of grief crushed her breastbone.

Elle, I wish I could comfort you right now.

She listened as they each went into the bathroom in turn and then Trig came into the room, eyelids slightly lower.

And he wasn’t wearing the paper mask. Somehow, she knew that that small slip of his “disguise” spelled doom for them.

It hadn’t even really worked to cloak his features, but it might have allowed him to believe that it had.

Now? Now that was no longer the case. She’d seen his unconcealed face—she’d know him if she saw him again.

He tipped his beer back and drained the bottle and then set the empty on her dresser, belching loudly.

His gaze tracked slowly from her bare feet to the discarded shoes and socks on the floor.

“Trying to get more comfortable? If you were ready to get undressed, you should have just told me. Oh, I guess you can’t.

” He laughed. He had small square discolored teeth.

Cami’s body trembled. Her mind didn’t feel like her own.

It felt crowded and chaotic, and she was having trouble accessing her thoughts over the clamoring inside her head.

He leaned in closer, and she turned away, nausea roiling in her belly.

“Oh, you smell so delicious, sweet thing.”

Suddenly her mother’s ringtone sounded from downstairs, and Trig glanced over his shoulder. He paused, and Cami’s eyes widened as she watched him. Her eyes darted to the mirror across from her and saw that Mrs. Willoughby was gone from her garden.

She could only hold on to hope. She didn’t know how to let it die.

The phone stopped ringing and then a second later began again.

Trig swore and left the room, and she listened as he went back downstairs.

Then he came back up and went into the primary bedroom, where she heard him demand of her mother, “Fern Willoughby. Is she a problem? You didn’t have plans with her or anything tonight, did you? Lie, and I hurt your daughters.”

She barely heard her mother’s muffled confirmation that she had no plans with Mrs. Willoughby. Cami’s muscles had tensed with a renewed flare of hope. Their neighbor had seen the flashes of light, and now she was calling her mother to ask if everything was okay.

I love you, Mrs. Willoughby. Now call the police. You see our cars in the driveway, right? Are you checking right now?

Of course, she might think the flashing was nothing, just the reflection of something inside that had picked up the light.

Maybe she figured that her mother wasn’t answering her phone because they didn’t want to be disturbed, or that she’d missed them leaving with someone else, and they weren’t home at all.

And even that doubt might keep her from alerting the authorities, at least with nothing more than a flashing light and what might be a gut instinct that things were off next door.

There were so many possibilities more likely than that the entire Cortlandt family had been tied up inside by psychopaths.

Please be nosy, Mrs. Willoughby. Come check on us. Or would they hurt her, too, if she showed up at their door? No, if they did, Mr. Willoughby would know where his wife had gone. When she didn’t come back, he’d call someone to check on her. Unless he wasn’t home.

Cami’s thoughts pinged in one direction, and then in another, bells ringing inside as though her brain were a pinball machine.

But the phone was quiet now, and there was no one at the door. The two men torturing them didn’t know that the woman calling her mother’s phone was just next door, but that wouldn’t help them anyway if she’d returned behind her walls.

Cami’s gaze went to the mirror, where she could see Mrs. Willoughby’s empty garden. The sun had almost set, the cobalt sky broken by bands of gold. For a moment she was there, free, drifting among the clouds, unbound.

And then Trig returned, pulled the shade, and hid the sky.

He stood above her, his eyes moving down her body and then back to her face.

She felt that gaze. It was greasy and foul, just like him.

Then he reached in his pocket and removed a small white envelope.

Cami’s pulse jumped and she shook her head.

No no no. Please, no. “Shh,” he said, and she tilted her head, watching as he poured the substance out on her bedside table and then scooped it onto the outside of the envelope and rolled it up.

She shook her head again as he turned back to her.

“I was gonna save this for later. For after all this. But why cut the party short now? Come on. This is gonna make it better for you. Trust me.” He bent down and used one hand to hold her neck and stuck the straw in her right nostril and then before she could move an inch, he let go of her throat and reached up and pressed on her left nostril.

She inhaled sharply, the sting of chemicals making her eyes burn.

She blew out of her nose but only managed to spray snot across her chin.

Trig snickered and used her sheet to wipe her face off and then poured some more of the powder onto her nightstand, bent, and inhaled it. “That’s it,” he said, tilting his head back. “That’s nice. I’m gonna be nice, Cami girl. I’m gonna be real nice.”

He knew her name. How did he know her name? Where had he seen it? A dozen places in the house maybe ... on their family calendar or a piece of mail. She hated that he’d said it. If felt like one more violation. She hadn’t given it to him. He’d taken it.

He unbuttoned his jeans and knelt on the bed, taking himself in his hand, and Cami closed her eyes and drifted even as tears poured from her eyes. The drugs made it easy to disappear. Her thoughts blurred as they hit her system, warm blood rushing under her skin.

She heard her eyeballs moving behind her lids, and she felt feathers tickling against her bones.

She was numb and detached, and she knew she cared even though she couldn’t form the why .

And the drugs did make it better for her, though she understood that they hadn’t been given as a kindness but as another way to control her.

She understood this, and yet the feelings attached to the knowing floated behind a gauzy cloud, separate.

She could see their outline, but the details were obscured.

She pretended she was floating, moving along the ceiling of her room, and that worked for a while, but then the cloud dispersed, bobbing away in opaque remains, and she saw what she’d been trying to pretend wasn’t there.

She watched the girl trapped beneath the bucking, heaving man.

She listened as he called that girl names and debased her in ways that Cami promised to forget.

The room grew dark, and that made it better and worse.

The chemicals inside her began eating away at her brain, shapes moving and shifting in the darkness, around her, on her.

The monsters she’d feared all her life had crawled from their hidey-holes and were eating her alive.

But not only her body, her soul. She watched it happen and couldn’t do a thing but survive.

And it was better than nothing but only barely.

She saw the shadow of the other man by the door, his shoulders curved forward, phone held in front of his face as he recorded her torment.

AJ. She still hadn’t seen his face. His laughter stabbed as much as the invasion of her body, and she struggled to stay separate from the girl being attacked as she bore witness to such casual evil.

“Don’t get my face, dumbass,” Trig panted.

“I’m not. Hurry up. It’s my turn.” Their voices were slurred and ghastly, their eyes glowed red.

She couldn’t speak. She could only bear what they did to her.

She was nothing more than a body, a vessel for them to use, trapped inside her own skin.

To have no voice. Not to be able to plead or ask why.

A voiceless no one. And she vowed, somewhere deep down that she only accessed later, that if she made it through this, she’d never let anyone steal her voice again.

They left her when Trig was done. But the worst was yet to come because next they visited her sister.

She slammed back into her sore, defiled body and suffered the worst torture of all as she listened to them do the same thing to Elle they’d just done to her.

The drugs they’d fed her did nothing to ease the suffering.

A faraway screaming took up inside her head, a ceaseless wail that she knew, no matter what, would always rise inside of her when she remembered this moment. And how would she ever forget?

She vaguely smelled the marijuana they smoked afterward down in the kitchen, where they again opened beer bottles and clinked them together as they got high and congratulated each other on jobs well done upstairs and then laughed and called each other names and egged the other on, so they came back and did it again.

To her, to Elle, and to their mother. Their beautiful mother, who had only ever been with their father. His college sweetheart, the mother of his children, the love of his life.

They were showing him the videos from the prison of his office—Cami gleaned as much from their conversation in the kitchen.

Her heart beat hollowly, the lump of grief and horror lodged in her chest, pressing on the organ so that it could barely pump oxygen through her blood.

A mass there was no way to ever extricate.

She asked herself then if she wanted to live anymore and couldn’t figure out the answer.

It went on. And on. And then at some point, Trig lay beside her and smoked another joint and started talking.

He sounded relaxed, his voice slightly slurred.

Her head pounded, and her body ached. He complained about gas prices and some guy named Joe who’d slighted him.

He called his father a shitbag and his mother a whore.

She cataloged every detail, the small facts of him once more boosting her resolve to live.

And as his voice became sleepy, as he began to snore beside her, Cami learned to hate.

For the first time in her life, she understood true rage.

And it cleared her mind of the last of the narcotics forced on her. It cleared her mind of the chaotic, crowded fear. Rage scalded the hopelessness and despair, even if only temporarily. Even if only long enough to make the fragile vow to live.