Page 57 of Devious Roses
Lucius’s croak of a laugh plays, bouncing wall to wall. A fucking ghost haunting me.
I spring upright and search the rest of the cell, steeped in the night’s shadows.
Then I remember it’s a mind game. My own mind playing tricks on me. I can’t hear Lucius’s laugh because Lucius isn’t here. He’s dead. I killed him myself.
The paranoia coiling inside me is a stubborn foe. It refuses to listen as I repeat the truth in my head.
Lucius is dead. He’s gone. He’s never coming back.
The silence becomes worse than the memory of his sickening laugh. I listen to nothing, and as a result, I’m forced to think about how he’d once filled up my cell with taunts. He’d visited me personally and told me all about what he was planning on doing.
I had surrendered. He was in charge. He was going to destroy me. He was going to hurt Delphine.
My blood pressure rises as if the threat is still real. I urge myself to calm down.
It’s going to be okay. This is temporary. It’s… it’s all temporary.
* * *
Days three and four feel just as never-ending. A blur of nothing and everything at the same time. The deja vu of the day before, and the unsettling uncertainty of the day tomorrow. I keep to the small routine I’ve developed, pushing myself to do crunches and knee lifts and anything else that counts as exercise.
My mind wanders to dark places.
Thoughts I try to shut out. Thoughts about Lucius and the horror I was subjected to. Thoughts about Delphine and how I’d give my left nut just to put an arm around her and press my face into the curve of her throat, where I could inhale the scent of her.
Day five comes and goes. I’ve lost the tenacity to move beyond a trip to the toilet.
On day six, my food gets shoved through the slot without a word from me. I don’t collect it, my body so stiff, I can’t tell what’s hurting and where. I’m a ball of unresolved tension with a fading mind that flickers from the present to the past and back again.
Being held captive by Lucius was the worst experience of my life.
But this is no cake walk. The mere boredom, the constant lack of mental stimulation, it begins chipping away at me.
At dinner, I slide to my knees and wait by the slot in the door so I can shout at the guards.
“When the hell you letting me out of here?” I yell to no answer.
Only cold, callous laughter.
I bang a fist against the door. “I’m fucking talking to you!”
Nothing.
Nothing is all I know these days.
I pace the dimly lit cell and contemplate raising hell. They’d have to let me out if I began ramming the cot against the door. It might be to sedate me or inject me with some dopey drug to make me less combative, but they’d still be letting me out...
“You fuckers!” I roar out of nowhere. “You get your kicks from doing this shit! Let me see you on the street… let me run into one of you! I’ll fuck you up!”
I’ve got no idea what the hell I’m saying. It’s a fall into delirium as I shout at nobody, making threats and promises I’ll beat somebody bloody. As my frustration cinches tighter around me and feels like a compression on my chest, I can’t stop myself.
I run straight for the door. I collide with it, slamming my fists, banging my head. Over and over again, I launch my fists and ram my head ’til I’m seeing stars and the floor is shifting beneath my feet. Then I’m smacking into the ground and struggling to do anything but jerk on the floor like some insect that’s been squashed.
“Delphine,” I croak.
She’s flickering in and out. She’s only a couple feet away. If I sit up and reach out my arm…
“Phi,” I say. “Phi!”