I kicked my legs up, trying to unravel myself from the arms the man had wrapped around me. “You let go of my sister!”
“No, I’ll do anything. Anything, please! No-ho-hoooo!”
“Theresa!” I shrieked.
“Julia! Don’t let them do this! Juliaaaa!”
“Hello? Anybody home?”
I shook my head softly and cleared my throat as I blinked back my tears. “Yeah, that was really my sister.”
I tried to wipe the dirt off the man’s cheek, but he leaned away from me. “Does she scream like that often?”
I couldn’t meet his gaze, so I took stock of the rest of his wounds instead. “Every night.”
“Every night?”
I reached down for another alcohol wipe. “That’s what I said. Got gum in your ears?”
I felt his stare on me. “How long have you been here?”
I shook my head. “We don’t have to talk. We can just—”
“How long have you been here?”
I unwrapped the alcohol wipe and brought my stare to his. “I stopped counting at ten.”
His brow furrowed. “And every night, you hear her screaming like that?”
I gripped his chin and turned his head off to the side. “I’m pretty sure that’s their version of torture for me. They bring her out, put her right in that room above our heads, and do God only knows what to her.”
Just as I went to clean the dirt off the side of his face, scratching, raking footsteps sounded above our heads. I froze, my gaze tilted toward the ceiling as I followed the tracks with my eyes. The man I was trapped with stood to his feet, following the noise as it slowly headed over toward the basement door. And when it swung open, the man with the hero complex stood in front of me.
Blocking my view of the stairs.
“You can deal with me,” the man said as he took a step toward the staircase, “but hands off the girl.”
I scoffed to myself. “Woman, thank you very much.”
He peeked over his shoulder. “Really? Semantics, at a time like this?”
I shrugged. “Semantics are important.”
“Whatever,” the man murmured, “just shut up.”
The familiar sound of a brown paper bag tumbled down the stairs and I smelled the sandwiches. I already heard the crunch of the chips and shivered at the thought of that salted goodness on the tip of my tongue. One meal was what I had gotten all that time down there. One meal at dinner time, and the rest of the day I was lucky if they remembered to get me a bottle of water.
But I wasn’t letting that man get away without answering some questions.
“What about my sister?” I asked as I ducked beneath the man’s arm.
“Don’t,” he warned as he reached out for me.
I slipped away from his grasp and tore up the steps. “I’m not escaping, I just want to know about my sister. Where is she? Is she all right? Is she still alive?”
The man pointed. “Get back down there now.”
“All I want is to know how Theresa’s doing. Please.”
