(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon (10 page)

She weeps louder, stuttering the thing we are to say: “M-m-my p-p-prince, y-y-you f-f-found me.”

“Aye, I found ya, and now I will free ya from this hell, my love.” I grimace, knowing exactly what is happening at this point. He’s kissing her cheeks and dragging his hands up her arms.

I know he scoops her up, carrying her weak and slowly relaxing body from the cell and up a set of stairs to the washroom. He carries her up and pours a bath, cleaning her and singing his fucking songs. The words of one still haunt me.

Listen, listen to the sound that bullets make of blood and bone.

Those words are haunting me, and yet I don’t know where I have ever heard them.

Then he takes her, trembling and cold, to the bedroom off the bathroom. When he gets her there he will make sweet passionate love to her, slow and soft. He will make her orgasm again and again, even if she doesn’t want to. She can’t help it. Her body will be relaxed and calm, and only her mind will be screaming as he thrusts in and out, rocking and swaying until she’s certain he knows every inch of her body and soul.

The whole event will be nothing at all like what he did with me when we were in the real world. It will involve cuddling and a condom, and him telling her he’s going to protect her and keep her safe from evil in the world. Then he will bathe her again, singing and loving and rubbing places that are sore and overstimulated. He will tell her that he will take her back to his kingdom and marry her. They will live happily ever after. It’s a fantasy like no other, and it will last the whole afternoon.

Until he realizes he must put her back into the cell, but he will be back. And she should never doubt his love, because it is eternal.

Eventually he will close the door, leaving her there. She’ll be sore from hours of sex, not to mention exhausted and confused from the tranquilizer.

Jane and I clasp each other’s fingertips in the dark, the only part of us that can really touch through the thin gap. We always do it when a cell opens that doesn’t belong to either of us, we sigh simultaneously with relief. He has chosen someone besides one of us, which means we will enjoy another day of safety and peace.

When he closes the door to the stairs, carrying the girl away from us, the cells reanimate as girls begin to breathe and softly whisper to one another. Jane’s breath is upon my face when she speaks softly: “Just once I want one of us to fight back, to attack him and free the rest of us.”

I nod, thinking how it would all be impossible. “That bathroom and bedroom aren’t above the ground. I don’t know that it would be easy to find your way out of here. And the daylight would blind you upon leaving. We’ve gotten so used to the dark. He would have the advantage. You would have to attack and lock him in the cell, but before the fucking needle.” I need to stop cussing so much.

She sighs. “But if you could knock him out, you might stand a chance of escaping—and freeing everyone else. What’s in that room that could knock him out?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’ve only been in it a few times. The bathroom has that massive claw-foot tub and the toilet and the sink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything but a towel and some soap, the French lavender soap. If I ever smell it after we get out of here, I’ll kill the person holding it.”

She chuckles softly into the crack. “You know it. Same for basements. I will never own a house with a basement. I want a house made of glass so I can see the whole world around me, every nook and cranny, from my window. There will be no shadows.”

We sit in the corner, holding hands and waiting for the sound of her cries when he puts her back into the cell. She cries a lot, that redhead. Her name is Jenny, Jenny Rutledge, and she cries more than any girl here. But for some sick reason, he likes it. He likes it when we cry.

Her screams wake me up and I think Jane too. She jumps and grips my hand. The door slams, and the redhead screams violently. I didn’t even realize I’d fallen asleep, but I clearly have, and the afternoon has gone by. He has entertained himself, and now the redhead is back in her cell and screaming.

“Don’t make a sound,” Jane whispers so softly I can barely hear her. “He’s pissed. She’s done something bad.” I blink, trying to wake up.

The girl screams again, and in the mix of her screams and raging words, he speaks in a low tone. I can’t hear anything he says, but her sobs quit for a moment, and I hear the thing that makes her scream. He strikes her. It’s the sound of a lash. Like whipping a person with a belt. She screams again, and every inch of my body feels her pain. I am so tight and trembling that my muscles are spasming from the exertion of holding myself this way.

He strikes again, and again she screams but I think a little less. At the next strike, she doesn’t scream at all. He shouts something muddled, something I don’t understand, and the door slams again. The lock clicks in anger. His movements are rough and overly done, making more noise than is necessary. He’s snorting and spitting when he leaves the area, again crashing and slamming doors. His footsteps find their way back in; he rattles a lock. The door slams open and shut, and his grunting is obvious. One of the girls, maybe the fallen redhead, getting this violation is silent. She takes the grunting and the savagery without a sound. He’s done in seconds, and the door opens and closes again roughly.

There is no sound once he’s gone. The redhead is either dead or passed out from the pain.

We sit in the dark, waiting for something to change, something to bring us back to life.

Jane whispers to me, soothingly, “When I was a girl, I had a sister named Andrea. We were twins, she and I. She was the better child; my parents were always angry with me over small things. But Andrea was perfect. I rarely remember details of the life I had before the accident. I think I locked them away so I could make my parents perfect in my mind. But they were flawed in a few ways. When they died in the accident and I had lost my memories, I made certain I created new ones of them. I took pictures of my parents and told myself lies about them. Lies that made my life before the accident perfect. But then I went to the orphanage and I learned there were kids with stories so bad, mine seemed a bit sad, really. My parents had loved me, my sister was my best friend, and my house was clean and beautiful inside. The other kids from the orphanage had terrible lives. They’d been taken from their parents. Or they’d been left at the orphanage. I realized then that nothing about my life was as hard as theirs, and that I needed to be positive about my past and my limited memories. The nuns taught us that rarely is the truth of the matter the truth of the matter. Rarely do we see what’s behind the story. They taught me not to pity the children left there, because they were safe and loved, in a way. And perhaps their lives were better than what they might have been.” She lowers her face to my fingers and kisses softly. “This place and this life and this hell are the same. We cannot see the driving force behind what is wrong with him. We cannot pity the other people here, because we do not know the whole story. We can only be positive and hope for the best. That’s what survivors do. We don’t take on the shit we see and hear and suffer. It isn’t ours. It’s being done to us, but it doesn’t define us.”

I feel a tear slip from her cheek to my fingers, and nod. She can’t see me or know that I have agreed with her, but I can’t speak. My heart is aching, and my stomach is on fire.

We sit in silence and wait for a noise from the room. Part of me hopes the redhead is dead, freed from this terrible fate.

“Do you believe in God?” I whisper to Jane.

“I don’t know. I believe in miracles. I believe in science. I believe there is something else. The nuns taught us to believe in God, and taught about the goodness of him, but in this place it is hard to see the light. One of my favorite sayings is that only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars. And so we should be able—there is no darker place on earth. But I dare say the view from here is rather bleak and the outcome is rather hopeless. If I see the stars once more in my life, I will count myself lucky.” Her positivity talk doesn’t seem to have lasted long on her. I think it’s a weak moment, made entirely from the fear we both feel for the girl named Jenny.

So I do the thing she does. “We will see the stars again, Jane. We will see justice for the things that have happened here.”

She answers with a squeeze of my fingertips.

It is a long time, filled with tense silence, before we hear a noise. It starts with a whimper and then a shaky moan. Jenny cries out to us, “M-m-my b-b-back, m-m-my skin is t-t-torn.” She heaves her words. I’m certain each face of the other seven girls is the same as mine. Scrunched and wincing in desperate empathy. “P-p-please help me.” She starts to sob, and my need to help her worsens. I grip Jane for dear life, not sure what a single one of us can do.

One of the girls, one of the older girls, Lacey, speaks in a soft tone, “Jenny, you need to get the water from the fridge. One of the bottles of water, and pour it on the wound. Then lie on your stomach and let the air get at it. No shirt or anything touching it. You need to do this now. Don’t touch it with your hands at all. It will be fine so long as it doesn’t get infected.”

“Okay.” She sniffles and moves, making small noises.

Stumbled steps.

A groan.

The fridge—first she bumps into it and then opens it.

Water bottles and food are moved.

The fridge door closes.

The water bottle lid is unscrewed.

Water pours.

A cry fills the air, shaky and weak.

More water drops to the ground.

Actual sobbing.

A gasp as the water bottle falls to the ground.

Stumbled footsteps.

And then it is quiet again. I believe she has passed out from the pain. I only hope it was on her bed.

Jane sighs. “She’s going to die.”

I don’t have a response to that.

Jane is quiet for a moment before whispering again, “What’s your favorite thing in the world?”

I shake my head, not sure I can remember things like that. I make a throaty sound that’s meant to be a chuckle but it comes out too much like a cry. “I think my bar has lowered for any sort of standard. I think being in my bathing suit, sitting in a friend’s pool, with a drink in my hand and the sun on my face, could count as a top favorite now. Before it wouldn’t have even made the list.”

“Mine is the History Channel. I miss it, and I never even noticed I watched it too much. The last thing I saw on there was about the women who were spies for Bletchley Park during the second World War, in England. They were common women to everyone who met them, nine thousand housewives and simple shopgirls, but they ended up being discovered as varying types of geniuses. They saved the British armies from many attacks by code breaking and finding patterns in attacks.” Her voice cracks. “I miss TV.”

I nod, missing everything.

10. The first snowfall

 I
force myself to do the push-ups and sit-ups. I force it every day. I don’t like exercise, I never have, really, but the weakened state of my body is frightening. I can feel it. I don’t fight him at all anymore. There isn’t any point. He would win, no matter the effort I gave. So I play his game, I say the right things. I don’t even cry anymore. I hate that about myself. I wish I could cry, but I seem unable.

Jane cries more lately. Sometimes when the fridge door is open I see the shock and horror on her face before she realizes I’ve seen it. She makes herself look calm again. We spend all our time huddled in the corner, giving each other private moments when we go to the bathroom. And even then sometimes we remain while the other pees in the dark. There are no boundaries. No walls. No defenses. He has broken them all, our mighty prince. He has torn down anything that stood between him and our total obedience.

“I don’t feel so good.” Jenny speaks softly, her words slurring a little. She’s slowly gotten sicker and sicker. I did suspect infection, but now I think it’s a lack of will to live. I don’t think she’s eating. Rory hasn’t seen her since he beat her mercilessly, still the worst beating I have ever heard in this place.

“You have to eat and drink, Jenny,” Lacey calls out to her. We’ve all been talking more since he nearly killed her. I don’t know about them, but for me the realization that we might be dead no matter how we behave has made me chattier. If I’m dead either way, I’d rather have spent my last days talking to them and not being alone.

“I can’t eat. I just get sick.” Jenny’s voice is so weak I can hardly hear her now.

“She’s dying. She has an infection. There’s no way she’ll make it if he doesn’t come soon,” Jane whispers from her bed.

She opens her fridge and grabs a bottle of water, drinking some and passing the rest to me. I sit in the corner and nod. “I don’t know if it’s infection. It’s been a while since she got hurt, and she said it’s turning to scabs pretty well. I think she’s just giving up.”

In the pale light of the fridge that now seems as bright as the sun, she gives me a weak smile. “It’s not so easy to stay strong here.”