He’d been right.
I’d become him after all.
18
Shay
Tom leaving the knife behind had been a test, then.
One that I had very obviously failed.
What had even been the point of it? To see if I’d try to escape? To see how far he’d broken me? Why give me hope only to snatch it away at the last second, like a cat playing with a mouse before the kill?
I didn’t know anymore. Couldn’t think clearly enough to parse his motivations, to untangle the intricate web of manipulation he’d woven around me.
I’d woken up chained to the wall, as if my hours of desperate work had never happened. As if I’d dreamed up the whole thing. The knife and plate of food were gone, vanished like they’d never existed. Everything was exactly as it had been before, reset like a stage between acts, props removed and replaced for the next performance.
A few hours passed in that timeless gray space.
But then, I started to feel like something was wrong.
It took me a moment to realize what it was.
Tom never brought me dinner.
That had never happened before. The meals had been the one constant, the one thing I could count on even when I refused to eat, even when I threw them at his head. Three times a day, regular as clockwork. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. A routine that made this nightmare feel almost mundane.
Not this time, however.
Had I made him angry?
The thought sparked something close to fear. I’d seen Tom frustrated before—had seen him hurt and desperate and pleading. But angry? That was new territory.
I wondered if I’d finally crossed some invisible line. If the escape attempt had been the last straw, the thing that pushed past his seemingly infinite patience into something more dangerous, more volatile. Maybe he’d decided I wasn’t worth the effort anymore. Maybe he’d realized I would never give him what he wanted—my understanding, my acceptance, my complicity in his madness.
Was he going to kill me now?
I didn’t know how I felt about that. Angry, probably. Terrified, certainly. But all I actually felt was hollowness—a vast empty space where emotions should have lived, numbness spreading like frost.
At least no one could say that I’d gone down without a fight.
Time continued its distorted crawl. My stomach cramped with hunger. My mouth was dry, tongue thick and cottony. The single bulb overhead flickered occasionally, threatening to plunge me into complete darkness but never quite committing.
Then I heard it.
Footsteps.
But there was something different about them—the rhythm was off, the weight distributedstrangely.
The basement door opened, the hinges groaning their familiar protest.
I looked up, my heart suddenly racing, adrenaline flooding through me in a cold rush.
Tom appeared at the top of the stairs, and he was carrying something over his shoulder.
No. Not something—someone.
A woman. I saw it once he laid her on the concrete floor a few feet from where I was chained. The body hit the ground with a dull thump that echoed in the confined space, the sound reverberating in my head like a struck bell.
