So when that fourth man came in, I was only able to gouge one eye out, scratch trenches into his skin, before he pinned me down.
All I could do as he shoved my face into that mattress and forced himself inside of me was stare at the crack in the wall where Merlin was hiding. Safe from all of this.
All I could do was plot as they tore my insides to shreds.
“Don’t cum in her pussy,”Isaak had said when he brought the first lamb in to the slaughter. Morris was his name.“We can’t have her getting pregnant. Mr. Alascer will take care of that when he picks her up.”
Todd didn’t know about that rule, and Josh broke it before I killed him. But everyone else? They followed the rules. They never came inside of me. They fucked me all they wanted and came on top of me or finished it off in my ass.
And I continued to plot.
This book would be easy to write. Everyone dies in the end. Predictable to a point, I suppose. I haven’t decided if the main character would die too, but everyone else certainly would.
All of them.
Except for Phil and Merlin.
I whistled a short, low little tune, just a few notes, and a few seconds later, the mouse came scurrying out from his crack and ran across the puddle riddled damp floor towards my bed. Puddles of diluted blood. The smell was worse, I suppose. They only came in here and cleaned up my shit and piss once a week, although, I didn’t shit hardly at all anymore.
It didn’t matter, once I escaped this place, I would never smell this scent again.
I would never close the door again.
I would never come to the woods again.
Merlin climbed up the scraps of clothes I had tied to one side, and jotted over, his little black eyes welcoming and filled withlove.
I stroked his little head with my finger, watching him rub down the length of it before circling under my palm.
I twisted my hand over, palm up, and pulled him close, staring at him as he cleaned himself, as he breathed, as he lived.
My wounds were long since healed. All of them angry and dark, permanent. Phil said that there were creams for that, but he also still believed that he was going to get me out of here, and he wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell him that it wasn’t going to happen. He would have to live with the fact that he aided in selling me to a sex trafficking ring, and I was going to have to live with the fact that while I escaped, whether by gunfire or running, he would never get that kind of relief.
I did have to hand it to him though. He did his best to take care of me despite what they did to me. He never touched me once, not unless I said so, and on the days I didn’t want him coming anywhere near me, he remained on the other side of the room, talked me through how to clean the wound around my ankle from the shackle, and then told me stories of his home life.
His kid was named Peter. His wife Tanya. Beautiful little family. They lived in the suburbs too, and Tanya was pregnant with their second kid. A girl, he found out just a couple of weeks ago.
I almost hated him for that.
“Olivia.”
“I am Olivia Kingsmen, I am a writer, I am unbreakable, I am Claimed.”
I continued to pet Merlin’s head gently. I was going to make his life the best I could. I would. Whatever it took. Mice, after all, didn’t need much. A warm place to rest, some food. That was all. Their love was easily bought.
“We have to get you cleaned up. Mr. Alascer is on his way today. Right now.”
My eyes lifted to Phil’s, finding him standing just yards away, next to my table where he had managed to set up cleaning things without alerting me.
My thoughts were too loud to hear anything now, I think that had to be it.
Careful of Merlin, I pushed myself to a sit, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, the shackle weighing on my ankle. I held up Merlin, showing him to Phil. My heart was calm, my motions smooth. It was easy to become a savage when you had nothing else to do but work at it. I wondered if this was what happened to Everett. I wondered if this was how he became who he was. ‘They’ had kept him somewhere deep in the woods, tortured him, and he had become a little monster, the perfect little monster for Malachi to mold.
Phil dipped a rag into a bowl of warm water, ringing it out. “I don’t think you can bring him,” he answered my unasked question quietly.
That’s okay, I would bring him anyway. I didn’t need anyone’s permission, he was mine.
The only way to convince these people that I wasn’t a threat was to do as Azrael had suggested. Manipulate them. All I had were my stories now, and this story was the story of a girl whose mind had cracked.
