"The basement." There's a basement? We continue running until my legs give out, which doesn't take too long. I don't have enough strength or muscle to carry me far.
"I can't—" I wheeze heavily, falling to my knees, wincing from the small pebbles and soft dirt that press into my skin. "I can't run."
He scoops me up in his arms and throws me over his shoulder as if I were nothing more than a bag of sand. We move quickly through the rocky terrain and across a dirt road until we reach a slight hill, which reveals a large house with old brown-shingled siding and several broken windows. "The basement is in there?"
He doesn't respond, but his speed picks up until we arrive in front of two metal doors protruding from the ground. As he places me down on my feet so he can fuss with the locks, I notice a patch of green grass off to the left of me. I need to feel it. Reaching my foot over, I sweep my toes over the blades, remembering the sensation, relishing it.
"Come on," he says. I turn my attention to the open doors that lead to a set of deteriorating cement stairs. With Sin's hand gripping my forearm, I'm tugged down the steps, tripping myself several times before reaching the bottom. "Stay here."
He hits a switch, illuminating the daunting stone walls around us and runs back up the steps to seal the doors, locking them with a metal bar from the inside. "What about your dad?" I ask.
He hops down the stairs and steps directly in front of me, showing me how much larger he is than I am. "He can rot out there."
"Oh," I say. I think that would be okay.
As I study his face, I see the wounds left behind from his brawl, and I reach up and touch the side of his cheekbone. "You're bleeding." His skin is so rough that each follicle of facial hair pricks my skin like tiny needles. I don't flinch from the pain, but he flinches from my touch.
I ball my hands together against my chest, looking around the basement for something to help with his bleeding. Behind him, I spot a rag and reach over to retrieve it. Without thinking, I bring it up to his face. "Here," I say, holding the material down over the wound as I apply pressure. It's what the nurse in mom would have told me to do. His eye twitches as I press a little firmer. "I'm sorry."
He nods his head and wraps his hand around mine, pulling it away from his face. "Don't be," he snaps. His edginess frightens me a bit, but not enough to make me back away. Something about him makes me want to stay right where I am.
As I continue dabbing at the wound, cleaning up the excess blood, a thousand questions flood my mind. But the only thing I really want to know is, "Have you been here this whole time? All three years?"
Again, he nods. "No. I was locked up, and I just came back home last week after being gone for four years."
"Were you alone, deprived, and tortured too?" Doesn't sound as brutal when I say it out loud.
"Yes, but not like you." The tips of his fingers feather softly across my cheek, making me want to lean into his touch—a touch—and beg for more. Why is he touching me like this? "After being held in solitary confinement for so long, a soft, gentle sensation feels foreign. So foreign, it can be unbearably painful." He's right. Aching chills shoot down the lower half of my back, but I won't complain. "Fulfilling hunger after starvation can make a person sick." He removes his fingers from my cheek and in turn, presses his thumb against my bottom lip. I think I want to taste the salt on his skin because I can't remember what salt tastes like. But his thumb moves away quickly and the look in his eyes darkens with anger, or hunger, or maybe I don't know what the look is. "But the scariest observation I've come across…" Both of his hands cup around my cheeks with a slight roughness as he forces me to look up at him. "Is that the aftershock of a storm can be worse than the storm itself."
