No response comes. Terror fills my lungs. “Caden!”
My heart pounds against my ribcage, fists pound against the glass. Tears spill from my eyes. “Fuck you, Caden!”
He’s gone. He’s fucking left me here.
My hands frantically search for a handle, a gap, anything. I locate a doorknob, but it doesn’t give. Of course, it doesn’t. My legs give out from under me. I collapse to the ground, racking sobs expelling from me.
How could he do this? How could he be so evil?
The ground caresses my legs, so I let my whole body melt into it.
This is a bad place,the darkness says.
“Yeah, no shit.”
I can feel it in the air. An ominous presence that I’m not familiar with. It reeks of cleaning products and dead things. I think I should be grateful it’s pitch black.
As the adrenaline leaves my body and the exhaustion creeps in, the aches flow in. I’ve bashed my knees, elbows, shoulders. My head throbs like hell. We really are lucky we’re still in onepiece from those stairs. If we were really in one piece to begin with. Caden might be as fucked in the head as I am, just in a completely different way. How cold and merciless can he be? He saw the state I was delivered to him in, saw in plain sight what I came from. Saw with his own eyes when he stripped me naked what I’ve endured, and he decides to continue that? What kind of monster does that?
The tears come unbidden, through exhaustion and pain. These are the times I need Lewis. When I finally break. He’d always be there. Every single time. His presence made me believe I could get through everything. Then he was taken from me.
My brother died and that was it for me. I was alone. He took my soul with him. No one else loved me; no one else made me smile. He took every ribbon of goodness and joy from my life and buried it six feet deep with him. Sometimes I think about digging through that dirt. That dirt that separates him from me. Sometimes I think about shovelling heap after heap until I reach the very place that holds my life captive. Demanding that he come back and return what he stole. He had no right to take it from me. He had no right to die, to leave me alone, to suck every bright colour out of the world and leave it bleak and suffocating.
Another buzz of the collar rips through my neck and yanks a strained growl from me, anger swelling inside.
If Lewis were here now, he’d wipe the tears away and tell me to stay strong. To find a way to cope.
You can go the distance.
I weep at the memory of him saying those words to me.
Find something you can use.
“I can’t.”
Yes, you can, El.
My sobs come out strangled and hitched.
I miss him so fucking much. I miss his comforting smile, the soothing strokes he’d make down my hair while I cried in his lap. I miss the dazzling blue eyes that held so much peace, so many promises of a better life one day. I miss playing with the short, cropped blonde hair that he’d always say was better than mine. I miss his voice. God, that strong, unwavering, confident voice. The one that would tell me so many stories while he held me in his arms after getting beat so badly I couldn’t stand straight. I miss his encouraging words.
You’re strong, El, find something.
I shake my head and whisper, “You’re not real.”
I am here with you. Find something.
I sob, sniffle. I try to get my breathing under control, wondering if it’s the dark or my brother talking to me.
Whoever it is, I know they’re here to help me. Another buzz of the collar has me leaping up. I search blindly in the dark. There must be something in Caden Blackwood’s basement that I could use against him.
You can fight him, you can beat this.
A fire sparks to life within me. A fire that’s been dimmed for a long time. Lewis has come back to me in the dark, and with him by my side, I can beat Caden Blackwood.
CHAPTER 14
CADEN
