“Close your eyes, Helene. Breathe deep.”
I didn’t see which implement he chose. I just heard the slice in the air, the crack against my skin, and the first sharp strip of pain. It took me back to the last time I was down here. This time, knowing I wasn’t about to die, I felt a small space open where I hoped I could finally live.
It only took a few stinging lashes before I was crying. It seemed such a pointless exercise to bring all that stuff into the cell like we’d be camping out for countless hours when it took under a minute for the tears to flow.
I’d gone so long without showing a strong negative emotion that I needed a physical catalyst to turn it on and off now. At first, after my parents died, I’d felt things but hadn’t expressed the feelings, pushing them deeper and deeper until I couldn’t feel at all. I’d flipped a switch and turned a light off, not realizing it would be so dark afterward that I might never find the switch again to go back.
I’d told myself I didn’t want to go back, that it was better to be numb and empty. But I wasn’t empty. I was filled with so much that I just kept pushing down under the minutiae of daily life so that every breath became a ragged struggle under the weight of it.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
I sobbed as I hung helplessly in the chains. I didn’t know if I was desperate for it to stop or keep going. I couldn’t beg him. I didn’t know what to ask for. Just when I’d reach the end of my limit—the juncture where maybe I could die or maybe I could live—he’d heal me. And it would start all over again.
Time held no meaning under Gabriel’s whip. The only thing that seemed to punctuate it was when he switched implements. Then I’d remember where I was and what was happening, because inside that bright shining ball of pain there was nothing but the relief of all the tears I hadn’t been able to cry, all the grief I hadn’t been able to express, and the suffocating guilt for the things nobody would punish me for.
I didn’t care why Gabriel did it. I didn’t care if it was a punishment for stabbing him, or if that was only an excuse to bring me down here. I didn’t care if he merely acted out his twisted plan to bring me back to the world of the living and out of the land of breathing shadows. Inside, in the deepest places, this was the punishment I knew I deserved for destroying everything—shattering my family because I was too naïve to know just how dangerous night was.
I don’t know if he thought I was only trying to be strong for Simone, but all I wanted to do was stay in this moment where I didn’t feel already dead.
The whip clattered to the ground. Now that the tears had started, I couldn’t turn them off. Just as I’d feared, I didn’t know how to stop. It was this pathetic hiccuping sob that went on and on. Gabriel unchained me and caught me when I fell into his arms; then he carried me to the makeshift bed.
The sheets were dark red, as if he’d anticipated staining and didn’t want to wreck another fine white linen sheet or pillow case for me. He laid me on my stomach. I was sure he must have broken my skin again because of how it burned. It seemed only a small measure less extreme than what had happened the last time I’d been down here.
After healing me, he took a towel from the items brought down for us and ran it under water from the tub’s faucet. He squeezed out the excess, then returned and laid it across my back. The warmth was unexpectedly soothing. He left me for a few minutes and opened the door.
I thought he might be going upstairs and felt oddly disappointed and alone. But he only murmured a few words to Santo then came back in and bolted the door. He draped the towel over the side of the tub and joined me, pulling the covers over us.
“Santo is bringing food down.”
My stomach made a noise as if to complain of its neglect. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until the mention of food.
“I cried it all out. Aren’t we going upstairs, Master?” Now, saying that word wasn’t some silly thing I did to appease him for our bargain. It was honest. Desired, even. I wasn’t in control of my fate anyway. To wrap it up and hand it to him was relief. If I couldn’t control things, let him deal with it. Surrender was the only option for those like me in a world like what he’d created.
Gabriel ran his fingers through my hair and raised my wrist to his mouth. He kissed the tender skin there and bit me. It seemed an incongruent response to my question until I realized he was feeding for information, not hunger. I had no power to lie to him. He’d just take the truth out of my blood if he ever doubted me.
“You haven’t cried it all out. Not even close. This will be a long process.” His mouth moved to my ear. “But relax, you believed you were telling me the truth. That’s what counts.”
Although Gabriel was still clothed, and I was nude, it seemed intimate under the blankets with him. It was perhaps the first echo of closeness I’d felt to another living soul since my parents died. It had been hard to be truly close to Simone. Every time I looked at her, all I could think about was how completely I’d failed her. There was an unspoken set of rules for the eldest sibling—a code to shield and protect the younger ones, to help them so they didn’t go through all the same hardships you did. I’d fallen far beneath those expectations.
A sharp rap rang out. Gabriel rose, leaving me wrapped in the blankets. He took the bolt off the door, and Santo entered with a covered gold tray which he placed on the table. Mona came in behind him with a stack of books and placed them next to the bed. Her furtive gaze swept the cell as if cataloging everything. Perhaps she wondered why I wasn’t in the private cottage or in one of the nicer rooms. Why were we in this cell when Gabriel owned everything and ruled over all of us?
She didn’t say anything, but I knew the moment she reached the main level, the gossip would start.
When we were alone, Gabriel gestured to the food. “Eat.”
I went to the table, self-conscious about the nudity that hadn’t bothered me moments before.
Under the dome was a small roasted and stuffed hen which lay on a bed of wild rice. A circle of caramelized carrots wound their way around the plate. I stared at it.
“Something wrong with the food?” Gabriel asked.
I shook my head quickly and dug in. I felt guilty eating this, knowing Simone subsisted off of vaguely edible things originating from cans and boxes. As I ate, Gabriel settled in to read one of his bound paper books. There was a stack of about twelve of them on the concrete floor. They were all huge. None seemed like light reading.
I watched him while I ate, my gaze shifting back to my plate each time he looked up. I wondered if this was more of Mona’s culinary skills. The hens had been roasted to perfection, the warmest rich brown with seasonings, the slightest crisp to the skin, covering moist tender meat underneath.
“Do you eat? Food I mean?” The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them. I wasn’t sure how much chatter he was willing to put up with from me. We weren’t friends.
He glanced up mildly from his book. “I do. But not at night.” He returned to reading, signaling that he didn’t intend to elaborate.
In the silent spaces of his reading and my eating, I fell back into my normal worries.
Sometimes I worried the light would never return. Not only since I’d been in Gabriel’s care, but even before. Night felt so indeterminable that it was hard not to wonder if it would last forever each time it descended.
A lot of us developed depression a hundred hours or so into it. The feelings didn’t abate until day unless drugs were purchased to blunt the effects. For a while I’d tried to tell myself it was only this—merely needing the light—that I could be fixed with a pill. But the day didn’t make it go away. The light only caused me to have to hide and pretend that all was well.
Gabriel put the book down and started filling the tub. “After you finish dinner, you’ll have a bath. Then we will resume our project.”
From somewhere deep inside me, the barest sense of anxiety rose—anxiety regarding my own fate.
/> How novel.
Chapter Five: 482 hours until day
He was right. The first whipping only peeled the outer layer. The relief of tears and feeling anything at all. There were so many other tender, untouched layers beneath where we’d been. I began to feel a slow, creeping horror as it unfolded before me, as I doubted his assurance that he wasn’t a sadist.
He surely seemed to be getting something out of it, even if it wasn’t physical arousal. We’d slept many times. I’d eaten countless meals. He’d fed on my blood. But not once had he touched me in any manner beyond what could be delivered by the various implements in the crate. He’d taken my countdown clock away. He said it would be returned when we were finished with my rebuilding.
The best indicator of time in the cell was that every few sleeps someone came down with fresh red sheets, stripped the mattress and pillows, put the new sheets on, and took the old sheets out. That and the feeding schedule. I etched marks on the wall beside the bed, another of which I made after three meals and each sleep. Gabriel had indulged this. I’d counted twenty sleeps so far.
Even with the markings, my grip on time was tenuous at best. He’d whip me and take me to the brink of what I could stand. He’d let me hang there a moment in the chains as the throbbing pain trailed down my back. Then he’d heal and soothe and comfort me. We’d break for me to eat, for baths, for us both to sleep—or I think he slept. I’m not entirely sure.
My sleeps were dreamless and deep; they seemed to go on forever and last a moment all at the same time. There was no privacy—for either of us—but its lack drew me deeper into him each moment this continued on.
His vulnerabilities from his own lack of privacy made us somehow equal at times in this space. But it only took a little pain under his hand to remind me this was an illusion. His vulnerability was freely shared while mine was stripped and taken.
He used the implements from the crate to shatter every wall I’d built around myself. All my protections fell in a pile at my feet. I felt as if I walked through fire but wasn’t consumed. As if I were the fire. But it was only his healing powers that gave me that sensation. If he were a mere human doing this, I would have been dead hours and hours ago.
I couldn’t hear my own crying anymore. I’d grown numb to the sound of it. Just white noise. I swear I think I detached from my body, but Gabriel knew immediately when it happened. I barely heard the collar clatter to the ground as his fangs sank into my throat, demanding that I come back. He could pull me back into myself by drinking from me—particularly when he made me feed on his blood at the same time.
The mutual feeding lasted only a few seconds, but I felt him living inside my thoughts, and me living inside his, and the desire for something besides death began to bloom inside me.
I pulled away from his wrist. “Stop, please, Master, no more. I can’t…please…”
I couldn’t take another moment of this. Not another lash across my back, not another tear down my cheek, not another strangled sob that I couldn’t determine the source of. Was it the physical pain, or was that only the trigger that let the other pain bubble to the surface so it could burn here in this isolated cell with the only other being that existed for me now?
His tongue dragged languidly over my throat to seal his mark. Nothing he did in this small dark cube was hurried. His attention returned to my back. “We’ll see,” was all he would say.
I deflated at that. I wanted there to be something I could do to make this stop. There was nothing I wouldn’t give him, no order I wouldn’t obey. The defiance had slipped out of me in drips and drabs without my conscious awareness of it leaving. I had become a thing to be molded, and I found myself willing to assume any shape he dictated—even the shape of someone who wanted to live.
The key turned in the lock of each shackle, and the metal clinked against the wall as the chains were relieved of supporting weight. I mimicked them as I fell into Gabriel’s arms. I clung to him, desperate now to stop this, to give him any new obsession—something that didn’t require never ending drops of my blood.
He let me rest on the mattress while he ran water in the tub for what seemed like the thousandth time. It occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to Simone since we’d been down here.
I’d promised I would call. What if she was worried? What if she forgot to take her pills because of it? What if she thought no one was coming with her medicine and she was trying to space them out? Taking the smaller risk now to avoid the bigger one later? But there was no smaller risk. I hoped she realized that. She couldn’t miss a dose.
Gabriel turned from the filling tub, his gaze darting sharply to mine. “What is it, Helene?”
His intrusion startled me. Even if he couldn’t read my thoughts, he’d felt my emotions as if they’d come from his own soul.
“Simone,” I whispered.
“She’s been checked on multiple times.”
How could they have checked on her? Did he mean they’d called or something more? Had they been to the house? Had they gotten in? Did he have her now?
Gabriel moved to my side. “My people have been viewing the surveillance.”
“Surveillance?”
He sighed. “I forget you’ve only just been introduced to the hidden realities of the world. We have cameras in everything—the glass screens, the walls, the lighting fixtures. They are in businesses as well as homes. We manufacture them into the building materials, and they go in without anyone being the wiser. We can call up anyone or anything we want at any time.”
I’d already grown used to the lack of visible technology in Gabriel’s old-fashioned aesthetic. Even though he controlled the city, I had difficulty wrapping my mind around the fact that tucked away somewhere on his property was a lot of technology that allowed him to spy on anyone he wanted whenever he got the urge.
“H-have I been watched before?”
“Not by me. It’s possible a member of my surveillance team has seen some of the feeds of your work or home, but before you arrived, I wasn’t aware of you. It’s a big city with a lot of people. Just because we record everything doesn’t mean we’re bored enough to watch it all.”
Was that supposed to pacify me? This potential complete violation that lurked at the corners of everyone’s existence?
“But someone has seen Simone recently? Is she scared?”
Maybe Gabriel hadn’t been sleeping all the times I had. Or maybe he hadn’t slept as long or as deep. Had Santo kept him informed at the door, or had he left me to glean intel himself? It felt like a betrayal that he might have abandoned me even while I slept. I’d come to depend on his presence. It was a comfort even when he was the source of my pain.
No…he was the key to unlocking it. The pain had already been there, a far worse pain than anything physical. This was release, relief. Or it had been before we’d crossed whatever indefinable line we’d crossed. Now I found myself recoiling and fearing all the things I’d believed myself indifferent to.
The thought drifted through my head that he was succeeding in his mission. Somewhere deep inside my consciousness, a part of me had decided I had things to lose now.
“Your sister is fine. She still has a good supply of drugs, which she is taking on schedule. She’s been called and reminded to set her alarm so she doesn’t forget one. Her refill will be delivered in plenty of time.”
And then what?
The fear on my face must have shown because he said, “She won’t be harmed or taken from your home.”
“T-the key box. You’ll need it.” I’d nearly forgotten I’d taken it with me and that Simone was trapped inside. Just another thing to feel guilty about. It was one thing to keep a door locked for your own protection. It was another not to possess the key.
I imagined Hinkly, pacing back and forth, sensing my sister’s growing agitation at being trapped and alone for so long. I’d at least been outside in fresh air. At least I hadn’t been alone.
“We have it. It will be taken care of.?
??
He turned the water off and came back for me. I watched, riveted, as he stripped off his own clothing. They’d brought him a steady supply, whereas I’d been left nude for the duration with only the crimson bedsheets to cover me at his discretion. I never got tired of seeing him peel the shirt and pants from his body.
He was art—the kind you could sit in a museum and stare at for hours as deep thoughts rose from the subconscious abyss, only to be shattered in the next moment by some mundane intrusion from the real world.
Though I’d seen him this way many times, he’d taken his baths separately from me. Besides the whip and the feel of his fangs embedding into my flesh, his only direct physical interaction with me had been his arm draped possessively over my body on the mattress each time I found sleep.
Gabriel lowered himself into the tub, disrupting the water as he settled. Steam rose. He motioned for me to join him. I went to him, feeling awkward and unsure.
He sensed my hesitation. “I’ve whipped you countless times. I’ve held your existence in my hands. I’ve drank the very essence of your life, and sitting in a tub of hot water with me is where your line is?”
“I’m allowed lines?”
His expression was hard. Not a joker, this one. “No. You’re allowed to experience whatever I deliver to you. You’re allowed to feel and express those feelings. But you get no boundaries.”
Because I was his slave until the sun crawled out of the depths of its grave to rescue me. And Gabriel wouldn’t let me forget it.
But it wouldn’t have mattered. I was weaker than him by a large measure. Even if I’d had boundaries, I didn’t have the power to enforce them. I lived at his discretion whether we pretended I could refuse him or not.
Gabriel extended a hand and helped me into the tub. The porcelain edges seemed to rise up and close around me as if it wanted to drag me underneath the water and never let me resurface.
Did I still want that?
He reached over the side and retrieved a bar of soap from the dish on the ground. He lathered it in the water and pushed me gently forward.