I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.
“We can be together in here without him watching, okay?” Abbott’s scars are glaring at me, screaming my father’s name in raised pink flesh on his forehead. I wonder if I scream his name, would he come? Would my father come to save me the way he found my mother with this monster?
“Please, how about we take things slow?”
I want to be smart about this despite the way my heart gallops in my chest, sending floods of adrenaline into my bloodstream to fight until I’m dead. To kill rather than be violated. But I’m still shackled. Still restrained from defending myself. What good were years of training to fight if I’m helpless here? There were so many stories of women and the history of lady-doll oppression back when my mother was my age. They had to accept assault as if it were a part of their weekly routine.
I never thought…
“Please,” I choke out again.
“You feel it too,” Abbott assures me. And his lips jam against mine, this time with urgent, forceful pecks. With a freckled, shaky hand, he unzips his pants and lays his small, hard penis on my pelvic bone. The curly, carrot-red hair spiraling in a bush around its base.
I have no patience or self-control to try and be smart about this. I always thought I would be able to fake a bond with a captor. To make them like me and win their favor before I escape or kill them. But being here is different than the stories I’ve read. Being here is drowning and trying to remain calm. Being here is lying perfectly still while someone sets my clothes on fire.
I scream again, this time far more panicked and desperate. The scream carries a cry I haven’t heard come out of myself before. The sound is raw, visceral, and heartbreaking.
It’s the cry of a woman about to be raped.
20. Call of The Revenant
Niklaus
Sapphire’s absence yanks me outof my nightmare with a vicious whiplash.
The basement is empty. How did I miss this? Where has he taken her?
She’s gone.
Sapphire is gone!
I search the darkness. But there is no breath stammering from her weak lungs. There is no heartbeat. It’s just me here.
Did I black out?!
One minute Abbott was fucking assaulting her and the next no one is here at all. This momentary lapse makes me feel like I am not a goddamned man at all. How could I not protect a helpless woman from this evil?
Agatha’s injection is making me lose time!
I was stuck in a loop of those hollow days in that abandoned cottage. The flashbacks of lying in a grave while I tried to stop crying. The dirt underneath my fingernails. The smell of wet earth burning into my memory.
I cried for my father, for Niles, to come save me.
I was so young.
How long has it been since I relived those days? Yet Agatha summoned my demons with swift ease and pleasure.
But the absence of Sapphire’s steady breathing became terrifyingly loud.
I am alone in this cellar now. The stained mattress is bare. I scour the room in a haze with drooping eyes. It’s all empty.
I feel so fucked up in the head from Agatha’s injection that I begin to worry that Sapphire Valdawell was a figment of my drugged-induced imagination. What if she was never real? What if my reality was fabricated? That’s what Mind Phantoms do, isn’t it? What if I never time traveled, and I’m really from this time?
There’s a black hole forming in my chest. It’s not heavy like a weight. It’s a howling wind. The thought of being alone here in this era of old ways and sadism. Even the slightest bit of doubt that the Mind Phantoms invented this idea ofher…
Sapphire Valdawell.
Did I make her up?
