“If I see you again, I’ll have to believe it’s one of two things. Either you want me so badly you can’t stay away or you’re trying to fuck me over. Whichever it is, they both end the same way. With you chained in the basement of my home, hoping me and my friends don’t grow sick of fucking you because the moment I do, you’re dead.”
A glut of bile rises in my throat, and I panic, trying to swallow. When I inhale, some enters my lungs, leaving me coughing and spluttering.
“What was that, bunny?” he growls into my ear. “Want me to take a test run first?”
His fingers are back. Digging at me. Their rough pads hurting my tender flesh as he shoves them inside.
I can’t remember how to fight back. Can’t think over the cacophony of my broken face, my inflamed neck, my shell-shocked brain.
All my body wants to do is submit. That’s all it remembers. I spent half my life trying to forget but all those memories are right here, right in my face, and I’m as helpless, as useless, as I’ve ever been.
I try to find the will to fight but he drags me to my feet. For one shocked moment, I think it’s to escalate things, violate me with more than his fingers. He hauls me upwards, one hand clenching in a vice-like grip on the back of my neck, coldly mocking me with a laugh when I attempt to hit him away.
My knees sag with terror but when I can’t stay upright by myself, he leans me against the bench. In the mirror my face is half normal, half a swollen freak-show mask.
He pulls out a knife and a whine spirals out of my mouth.
“Don’t you like that?” He twists the blade to catch and refract the overhead light. “Aren’t you into knife play?” His laugh sounds like it crawled out from the basement of my worst nightmare. “Just taking out your tracking device.”
The tip spears my flesh, slicing into my shoulder until I’m hurting myself worse by struggling to get away.
“I don’t have a tracker,” I mumble, words distorted by my swollen throat. Tears stream down the hurt half of my face as he pulls the blade free, blood coursing over my bare skin.
When he pinches the wound, there’s a sharper pain. Then a bobble of metal rises and I stare at my reflection, eyes disbelieving.
“I don’t have a tracker,” the man mocks in a falsetto as he wipes the device against my dress to clear away some of the blood. “Did you really think Baxter would let you out to play without the ability to know exactly where you are?”
Five steps away. He tosses it out the small window. Five steps back.
I see the opportunity. To run. To scream for help. I’m too scared and disoriented to take it.
“Good girl,” he whispers in my ear, a twisted wreckage of praise that I don’t want to hear. His eyes meet mine in the mirror. “I can see why Baxter kept you.” His hand reaches around to squeeze my breast. “I’d have kept you, too.”
My pulse flutters, my heart racing at too fast a pace for me to discern the individual beats. When he whistles, I gasp and shrink from the piercing sound. The bathroom door presses inwards, another man—a stranger—standing there.
“Take Ms Chappel out of here,” my attacker says in a smooth voice used to issuing orders. He strokes his thumb along my swollen cheekbone. “If you need a change of clothes tonight, try a women’s shelter.” His smirk turns my stomach. “They won’t ask you any awkward questions.”
If the new entrant is surprised to find his boss in a female bathroom with a dishevelled woman, battered and bloody, standing beside him, he doesn’t show it. He takes my hand, pulling me, then reaching his arm around to half support me as he walks me out of the room.
A few people linger outside, no one looking my way. There’s a low hum of voices from the main restaurant.
Deep inside me is a courageous girl, ready to yell, and fight, and call for help. I wrap my battered body around her until she smothers, letting my newly appointed guard escort me from the venue. Walk me along an alleyway.
Then, ignoring the warning to never let your attacker take you to a second location, I dutifully tuck myself into the back seat of a waiting car, too beaten to make a sound of protest as he speeds me away into the night.
CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT
ISABELLE
My resolve stirs half an hour later. The car is waiting at a set of lights, the drizzle on the windscreen turning the red into a mosaic of rubies. My injuries are throbbing, the swollen damage visible even in the scant reflection of the passenger window.
“Hey,” I call to the driver who raises his eyes warily to the rear-view mirror.
“Yup.”
“What’s the name of the…” I try to think of a polite way to phrase it. “That man,” I finish lamely.
He frowns in confusion. “Andrej?”
