Another step.
Damien’s shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, something clutched in his hands. Blood spatter dots the white cotton. His tuxedo jacket hangs over the back of another chair.
An electric crackle fills the air with ozone, and the object in Damien’s hand resolves into a set of jumper cables. At his feet is a plastic bucket, half full of water.
Bryan snaps his chin up, and his eyes are wide, bulging. He jerks against his restraints, shouts muffled by whatever’s stuffed in his mouth.
“Ophelia.” Damien puts his body between me and Bryan. His hand cups my shoulder briefly, voice whisper soft. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Police released me.” My voice sounds distant. “I had to warn Bryan I’m using his address in case they drop by.”
Silence except for whimpering.
I sidestep Damien, a ring of tinnitus in my right ear. Squatting in front of Bryan, I feel across his stubbled cheeks and drag a sodden bandana from his mouth.
“Please,” Bryan pants. “I’ll do anything. Say anything, just—”
Damien sparks the jumper leads against each other, and Bryan gives another tear-soaked scream.
“I didn’t… it wasn’t… You don’t understand!” The words tumble over one another, slurred with pain.
“I’ll have the lawyer update your address.” Damien’s hand finds my arm, warm, reassuring. “I found something. Last night.” His words are stilted, hesitant. “On the camera footage.”
“What footage? Show me.”
The whimpers grow louder and Damien stuffs Bryan’s mouth again, muffling his pleas.
“It’s…” The leads clank against the wooden floor, and Damien’s warm hands frame my face, his concerned eyes staring into mine. “I really don’t want you to see it. If I describe—”
“No. If it involves me, I want to see it.”
There’s tension in his hands, then they drop away from my face. “Okay.”
He guides me to the table where a laptop sits open, the screen a bright blur. There’s a flash drive inserted, like the ones I saw in Bryan’s drawer.
Damien angles the screen towards me, pressing play.
My room appears in black and white, an image far clearer than the grainy camera stills I’m used to from cop reality shows. The footage shows Bryan leaving with our cocoa mugs, me changing and collapsing into bed.
The footage jumps and Bryan enters my room again, this time with someone else. A naked man.
My stomach heaves. I press stop rather than watch my own violation. All I can think about is my nightmares. Unseen men touching me, penetrating me while I couldn’t fight back. The mornings I woke, confused and sore, scared at the prospect of living through another day.
All the things I blamed on Craig.
I close the image, and the screen changes, showing a folder full of files. There are more drives piled beside the laptop and I switch one out, seeing the same pattern.
Enlarging it to three hundred percent, I frown at the labels, working out the first part are dates.
I insert another one. Another. Going through them all. One of them is the night before my suicide attempt. Once or twice a week leading up to it, nothing for months, then they start again.
The laptop screen swims and I close it carefully, my hands steady despite the emotions crowding my chest, compressing my lungs until I can barely breathe.
“How long have you been torturing him?”
“Less than an hour.”
I tug Bryan’s gag free and he immediately starts babbling. “I’m sorry. So sorry. But your mother stopped sending enough money, and I couldn’t afford—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head, voice pleading. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
