The lack of noise sneaking under the door was worrying in itself, and I rub my face to scrub the tiredness from my eyes. Surprisingly, Lucy and I hadn’t been fed yet, and those two assholes hadn’t come back. The light streaming in from under the door was just enough to turn the pitch black into gray, and I blinked hard and yawned . The flames engulfing my back flared briefly, but I was an expert at beating down the pain— it was all in my head, and my head had been through much worse.
“Lucy.” My voice scraped my throat, and she hummed a crackled sound as her watery, blue eyes met mine. “I made a lot of mistakes, but I just want you to know . . . taking this for you isn’t one of them.”
She teared up instantly, and I cracked a small smile as Lucy crawled the few feet between us and into my arms. Hugging her between my knees, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe, and as she cried quietly, I tucked her head under my chin. We had a choice, though it was more of a forgone conclusion, to be honest.
Those Italian scum were fully prepared to do whatever they wanted to Lucy unless I took it. For some reason, they didn’t want to sodomize me, which I thought washighly unfair.I got whipped, smacked around, verbally harassed, but not once did any of those grease monkeys pull down my pants.
How fucked up was that? I mean, when he said, ‘it’s you or her’, I wasn’t wrong in expecting some sort of sexual violation. I guess I wasn’t pretty enough. Maybe it was because I had recently cut my hair? Was it the whole flat-chested bullshit, or even the fact that my back was a major turn-off? In that case, they could’ve just done it before whipping me bloody, right?
I knew plenty of porn stars with less of a chest than me, too, for that matter.
“That’s so fucked up.” My murmur earned me a cry harsher than the rest, and I tightened my grip on Lucy as my mind continued to whirl dangerously. “You know, Lucy, I wish I had someone to go back to. I just think it’s better by myself, so I don’t have to worry about anyone else. You don’t need all that stress on you.”
“I think the first thing I’m going to do is eat something that’s not rice jacked up with protein powder.” Snorting a weak laugh at that, I grumbled lowly in agreement, and Lucy sputtered a breath that rolled down my sternum. “You said these guys brought me here to use me against you, right? What if they kill me?”
“As long as I’m alive, they’re not gonna kill you, Lucy.” The Italians were predictable thus far, so I was fairly certain about that. She flopped her head back to stare me dead in the face. “Besides, to be a good torturer, you need to have a stronger will than the person you’re torturing. Those guys think that just physically torturing me is gonna do the trick, but it won’t. If I was ever grateful to my brother for being a fucking psycho, it’s right now.”
“How can it be worse than this?” Sympathy struck my chest, and I licked my lips as Lucy gazed at me like I had two heads. “How can you be so . . . so nonchalant? Your back—"
“My brother heads the most powerful criminal organization on the planet, Lucy, and he’s a psychopath— at least, to me he is. This is nothin’. The truth is, a few years ago, I got a girl pregnant. I was younger and stupider, and she was after money to fuel her drug addiction. When we met, she was clean, but when she started drugging up again, I found out she was pregnant. She assured me it was mine and then she disappeared.” Shame coated my tongue, and I frowned as surprise flickered in Lucy’s eyes. “I was a spoiled rich kid, the youngest of four, but even with all that experience, I couldn’t tell she was lying. Anyway, my oldest brother, Carlyle, found out. I thought everything would be awesome— I’d get her clean, we’d have the baby, and everything would be perfect. But . . . ”
“But . . . what happened?” Man, now, I couldn’t even remember that chick’s name, and I had been so disillusioned it was embarrassing. The older wounds on my back split open, and I arched slightly as blood trickled down my skin.
“She wouldn’t fucking shut up. It was driving me nuts. She was screaming all the time, it never stopped, so Carlyle boarded me up in the house with her, alone, with no way out.” Lucy gasped at the horror of it, and, at the time, I had been under that same impression. I’d learned the hard way that hindsight is a wonderful thing, though, and I shook my head slightly. “Carlyle could’ve killed her himself, but that’s what he did. He didn’t let me out until she was dead, so I killed her. It doesn’t seem so horrific now because everyone was telling me it was a mistake and not going to end well. She was a heroin addict, I think, and that baby would’ve been addicted, and my own romanticized delusions blinded me.”
“That’s awful.” A dry chuckle breached my chapped lips, and Lucy covered her mouth to hide her frown. “How could your own brother do that to you?”
“I just said— he’s one fucked up guy, Lucy. Anyway, the point is that was justoneinstance. There were many. Some weren’t even my fault— they were just him flexing his muscles and squishing me under his boot. The point is, I’ve been through a lot worse than getting a couple lashes to the back. This isn’t the end for me, and it won’t be the end for you, Lucy. I promise you that.”
“I believe you, Mateo. What were you like before . . . before all that?”
“Ah, I had a huge, silver spoon up my ass. Basically says it all.” She smiled a real, genuine smile and I cupped her cheek to imprint it against my palm. “What about you, huh?”
To say I was curious, yeah, I was. But, more than that, I wanted to keep our minds off our circumstance. All I had to do was endure, try to minimize the impact on her, and we’d get through this.
“I had a normal childhood, I guess. I met Seth in high school, and we started dating in eleventh grade. We went to the same college, but my business degree took a lot less time than his law degree. On the day I graduated, he asked me to marry him in front of everyone— my parents, my siblings. I was so shocked that I said yes, but I felt kinda pressured to.” She sighed almost bitterly, and I stroked her cheekbone as her smile turned sour. “He promised he’d never let anything happen to me, but look where I am now. I don’t think I can ever trust him again.”
“That’s not fair. How was he supposed to protect you against professionals? Bad professionals, but professionals nonetheless.” Averting her gaze, Lucy inhaled a hiccupping breath, and my heart aced for her. “It’s not his fault. It’s no one’s fault.”
“Even if it was superficial and capricious, it was a promise Seth couldn’t keep.” There was nothing I could say to that, and Lucy’s expression slowly became relaxed against my palm. “I know it’s not his fault, but that doesn’t stop me from blaming him because it happened.”
Our conversation was halted when the hatch on the door clattered open, and Lucy jumped as I twisted. Flames licked up my back and down my legs, and I hissed even as the grating of metal on concrete gyrated against my ears. The prison tray-like plate was piled with rice that probably tasted like sand due to the protein powder in it, and Lucy left my grip briefly.
“You should eat some this time.” Shaking my head as Lucy sat down in the corner, between my legs, I clasped my hands as my stomach churned hungrily.
“I ate some of the last one. You eat it all.” It wasn’t a lot of rice, maybe a cup, but it also wasn’t enough for both of us. Lucy didn’t protest anymore when I doubled down, and I gulped down the saliva that pooled under my tongue as I watched her start shoveling rice into her mouth with her hand.
3
Lucy
I don’t know when I stopped panicking, when my mind calmed and this became my new quasi-normal. I gazed at Mateo unperturbed as he urinated into the hole in the front right corner of the room. I couldn’t pinpoint when it stopped bothering me that that was what we were reduced to. I barely heard that sound as my eyes followed the marks on his back, shadowed heavily in the gloom.
No, I didn’t know anything anymore, but Mateo seemed to knoweverything. At first, it was frightening how casually he spoke about what he expected them to do to him, but that didn’t make me any less glad. At the very least, he had warned me, and nothing could make meready, but the warning was enough.
The messed-up part was probably how bitterly disappointed he was at these people’s efforts to break him. My heart ached, knowing how bad his home life was if this was a simple walk in the park. Mateo just brushed it all off, and I couldn’t begin to imagine how psychologically tortured he must’ve been growing up.
Mateo’s back was a stinking, puss-dribbling, dirty roadmap of cuts and skin hanging off his ribs. Even so, his shoulders were strong and taut, and that wretched calmness of going through the motions eased my own troubled thoughts.
