Please, God, make this end.
“It’s probably all you think about, isn’t it? Reproducing and—mmm, your hair smells sweet.”
“Get off her. Now.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such quiet, bottled anger in Niklaus’s voice before. It’s a deep, authoritative boom in this silent basement.
Every bit of Abbott’s frame tenses with annoyance.
“Please tell your travel companion he will wake Grandmother.”
I flick my gaze to Niklaus in a panic. Please, not her again. Anyone but her.
I’m not surprised to see a lack of empathy as he slides his cool, downturned eyes to meet mine. His stare is merely surgical. Measured. Calculated. Observant of a situation he knows he must step up in if he has any decency as a human being at all.
I try to communicate with my eye contact. I beg him to put his hatred of me aside for one minute. Just one.
There’s a brief hesitation in his expression. For a single heartbeat, his focus loses its lethal precision. That glare isn’t so familiar anymore. It isn’t warm, not ever, but it’s lingering. No blinking. Just pausing like he’s surprised with himself for hesitating. Like he’s holding his breath for my situation to get much worse.
“Let her wake then,” Niklaus finally barks back, breaking our unusual streak of eye contact. That once hesitant stare lands back on Abbott. A slow dissection of an already dead animal. “I’m excited to see what that pious hag thinks of her grandson, groping a young woman. What do you think she’ll call you? Perverted predator? Insidious? Spawn? Desperatevirgin?”
Abbott’s face blooms with a flush of scarlet red, spreading all the way to his collarbone.
“TELL YOUR TRAVEL COMPANION TO BE QUIET!” he whisper-yells in my face.
I flinch and close my eyes again the outburst.
“Shall I call her down here?” Niklaus’s voice is smooth, but it doesn’t soften, it steadies.
Abbott puckers his lips as he considers this with beads of sweat forming around the raised pink scars on his forehead.
“Or is your small penis soft now imagining your grandmother witnessing your sad, pathetic,deeplyunattractive assault?”
I forget to breathe.
Abbott tumbles off of me, squirming, huffing, and wiping his forehead clean of the trickles of sweat. He looks down at me with a soured expression, balling his fists at his sides.
“I see my good intentions as a gentleman are not appreciated.”
The agonizing chills returns to my skin, crawling under my flesh and settling into my bones. But it doesn’t matter. I’d rather freeze to death than have that sad, weasel of a man lay on top of me.
The door closes quietly despite that Abbott probably wanted to slam it behind him, leaving us in the dooming darkness once again.
Once the light disappears, I relax back against the mattress, squeezing my eyes shut to attempt blocking that memory for good. If only I hadn’t made my situation that much worse by wetting the bed from the mere terror of that interaction.
“Thank you…” I mutter, though the sound barely lives on past my lips.
Niklaus is so quiet, I’m not sure if he heard me. But there’s a shift in weight on his chair.
“Your mother would have killed me if I didn’t step in,” he says.
There’s a thick layer of defeat and exhaustion in his tone. That cold, cruelness in his intonation has lost some of its frost. That bite isn’t as damaging as it was before.
Yes, my mother would have killed him. But she isn’t here. Will I ever see her again? What if we’re locked down here for the rest of our lives? What if we don’t have much longer to live?
“Your mother would have too,” I add hoarsely.
“Yes,” he agrees, sounding so drained. “You can thank me by getting us out of here. By getting us home.”
