“They don’t use real names, just screennames, I swear!” The nurse screeches.
Cassidy singsongs, “Wrong again.”
Then she smacks the palm of her hand down on the button of the machine, and the blood rushes through the tubes straight into their chests.
They don’t get a chance to scream as their bodies start convulsing and blood gushes out of their mouths, choking them.
I can only watch, dread curling through me even though I know they deserved to suffer.
Glancing at Cassidy, she doesn’t react, completely unbothered, with the corner of her mouth quirked.
She stands there drenched in blood, alive in a way that twistsmy gut. I can see the pieces of her stitching back together, and it’s something that draws me to this side of her.
I know what it’ll take to bring her back to me, but there’s one more person we have to deal with before I do,jackinthebox149.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We step back into the main room of the guest house.
The beds are empty now, stripped, abandoned, even the sheets are gone like the people who were on them.
At the center of it all is him,jackinthebox149.
Restrained to a chair. His head is tipped forward, blood drying at his mouth, wrists bound tight enough to turn his hands a dull, angry shade behind his back. His ankles are secured together with a zip tie.
And us.
The rescue crew has already departed. One girl made it. The one that was purchased.
Only her.
I let that sit in my chest for a minute.
I latch onto it because if I don’t, I will start counting the ones who didn’t make it. The ones who were here before we got here, and the ones who never even had a chance to be found.
My thoughts snag on a memory I didn’t ask for, their faces so clear. Marie and Sofie.
A sharp inhale cuts off.
Part of me wanted to find them here.
The other part isrelieved they weren’t.
This place doesn’t keep people alive; it processes them.
The temperature hasn’t changed, but the room feels heavier now, burdened by something unseen. As if the walls remember how they’ve soaked in every vile thing that has occurred here.
How many lives were taken in this house just to extend others?
My molars grind as my eyes land on the person at the head of all of this.
He stirs and lifts his head, eyes finding mine.
There’s calculation behind them; there has to be for a man in his position.
I tow a metal chair across the floor, and the legs scrape against the vinyl; the sound reverberates through the room.
I turn it, sit, and loosely hang my arms over the back with my chin resting lightly against them.
