I wonder if the police and firefighters gasped when they saw the stains of my blood splattered against the burned mattress.
Are pieces of my flesh still hanging off the restraints?
Are fragments of my abuse now seared to mix with the ash falling from the sky?
How many people have seen the life I’ve lived and found excuses to make sense of it?
What are people saying about me?
I’m too preoccupied with my cuffs and the knowledge that the entire town probably knows about the perversion I’ve suffered to notice Roman leaning over me.
Only when I feel his hot breath blowing across my face, do I look over my shoulder.
“What are you looking at?” he asks, his voice groggy and husky from sleep.
I don’t have the words to explain what I’m looking at, so, lost in thought, I hand Roman the phone, spinning around to face him as he squints tiredly at the screen.
“It’s too fucking early to read, angel. What is this? Why are you crying?” he asks with concern in his tone, instantly becoming more alert once he sees the moisture sliding down my face.
“They’re dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Fallon and Jimmy…” I say, staring into his gaping eyes.
“What? How?” Roman asks, sitting up in bed, bringing his eyes to the screen to begin reading.
“Murder-suicide, they’re saying… police found stuff that connects them to a crime they discovered at my house….”
Roman stills at my revelation, shoulders and neck tensing as the phone drops in slow motion from his hands to his lap. “What?”
“They know… and now everyone in town will know what they did to me….”
CHAPTER TEN
ROMAN
Monday
March 15, 2021
The bombshell that Amira dropped on me earlier this morning continues to filter through my mind throughout the day, distracting me as I change the oil on my Camaro.
“Dude, what the fuck do you think they found?” Ash asks me as he sits on the curb, cigarette dangling out of his mouth as he reads the article that I had Amira send me.
Sliding out from underneath the car, I fold my arms under my head and stare at the cloudy blue sky, thinking of the images I saw and what atrocities could have possibly been hidden underneath all that burned wood.
“I don’t know, but it has Amira completely fucking unhinged. She hasn’t made a fucking peep, and I haven't been able to get her out of the room all day.”
Amira’s beginning to worry the fuck out of me.
I know what it’s like to be trapped inside your own mind, with nothing but the paralyzing thought of your past being aired out to the world. The paranoia that comes with feeling like eyes are constantly watching.
Those thoughts kept me incapacitated in prison, and the only thing that kept me from fucking offing myself was Amira.
She was my escape, my fucking ray of sunshine in a dark and damp basement. Amira gave me something to look forward to as I counted down the days to my release, and I’ll be fucking damned if I got out only to let her drown in the waves of her past torment.
Sucking back on his cigarette, Ash continues reading the report. I can see the images from the article reflected in his gaze, the inferno of the home glowing in his whiskey amber eyes.
