The belt comes down.
The buckle catches me across the face, splitting the skin above my eye. Blood runs hot and wet into my vision.
I don't scream. I learned not to scream the second day. Screaming makes it last longer.
"You're going to learn,"John says, raising the belt again. "You're going to learn what happens to little shits who take things that aren't theirs."
The belt comes down again. And again. And again.
I count the blows. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.
At twenty-three, I stop counting.
At some point, I stop feeling.
I go somewhere else. Somewhere the belt can't reach. Somewhere the blood and the pain and the voice are just noise in another room.
When it's over, he spits on me and walks away.
I lie on the floor for three hours before anyone notices.
No one helps.
No one ever helps.
I come back gasping, choking, tears streaming down my face.
Webb is watching the monitor, expression clinical, detached.
"Fascinating," he murmurs. "The dissociative response developed early. Before Moore, even. You learned to leaveyour body as a child." He makes a note on his tablet. "That explains how you survived the Senator. You weren't really there for most of it."
I can't speak. I can taste blood in my mouth, phantom pain from a wound that healed fifteen years ago.
"Let's try another one," Webb says.
"No." The word tears out of me. "No, please, I can't—"
"You can. You will." He swipes the tablet. "This time, let's look at something more recent. Your first week with Moore. The moment you understood what he was."
The headset hums.
I'm gone again.
Moore's basement.
The chair. The straps. The table of instruments gleaming under the white lights.
Moore stands in front of me, explaining the rules again and again. His voice is calm, reasonable, the same voice he uses in his campaign ads. A voice that promises safety and delivers destruction.
"You belong to me now," he says. "Your body. Your mind. Your pain. All of it is mine to use as I see fit."
I don't respond. I don't know the rules yet. I don't know that silence is safer than speech.
"The first lesson is about expectations." He picks up a scalpel, turns it in the light. "You expect this to hurt. That's good. Expectations can be managed."
He sets the scalpel against my chest, just below the collarbone.
"But what you don't expect is worse."
