Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 147801 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 739(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 493(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147801 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 739(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 493(@300wpm)
Stop.
Someone make it stop.
My vision blurs and I stagger, falling against my car, still digging and probing and scratching at the skin, over and over.
And fucking over again.
Why can’t I get him the fuck out?
“What a weird little cunt.”
Declan’s voice is close now—behind me, I think—but I don’t give a fuck.
I want the blood gone.
I want the pain to stop—
“Right, boy.” Something pricks the back of my neck. “You’re coming with us.”
I think I hear other heavy footsteps and voices, and my eyes are closing, my fingers still twitching in my arm, in the blood.
The blood that I can’t remove him from.
Because I’m drifting.
Into the pitch-black void.
I wake up in water.
No. Water was thrown over my face, reeling me from sleep. Drug-induced sleep.
Because the inside of my mouth is dry and tastes funny, like sandpaper and detergent.
I’m in a metal chair, my hands bound behind my back and my legs strapped to the chair’s legs. My arm wounds are messily bandaged, probably so I don’t bleed out.
A mixture of humidity and the rancid body odor of the two buff men standing in front of me fills my nostrils but fails to disgust me.
I think I’m losing my sense of feeling. Maybe it left my veins with all the blood.
It’s better this way. I need my ability to shut down now.
The room looks like a basement, with stone walls, low lights, and a metal door.
Typical torture chamber shit, I suppose. I’ve never been in one because my grandfather made sure I wasn’t caught. Maybe I should have been.
If I had been, I wouldn’t feel so…insignificant.
Like a goddamn speck of dust.
A toy that you throw away and it bounces back just to be kicked and used, then thrown away again.
And again.
I’m being punched now. I don’t feel it.
Sure, my body is rattling against the chair, my hair is pulled until I feel it ripping, and my stomach and chest are kicked. The chair topples over, and I fall on the floor, hitting my head.
Yes, it hurts physically. It does. My pain receptors are working overtime, my nerves shocked from the assault.
But inside? It doesn’t hurt.
I’m still in that white room with all the blood splashed on the walls, and I’m trying to wipe it away, to get back my peaceful white room where I can just close my eyes and breathe.
Just for a while.
But they’re talking now—the men who were hitting me—saying things about how I creep them out and how I don’t scream no matter how hard they hit me.
They need to stop talking, because their voices are polluting my white room. The one in my head that I escape to when my mind gets too loud.
The one Kayden turned so white before he splashed it in blood.
My blood from that useless organ behind my rib cage that won’t stop beating.
Being alive.
And for what?
A shoe presses against my stomach, and I ignore Declan, who’s peering down at me, his face uglier in the dim light.
“Ye wanna die, don’t ya?” He smirks. “Ye think it’d be that easy?”
I don’t reply, because I have nothing to say to him. Maybe it’s better if he kills me, because that white room is dripping in crimson no matter how much I wipe the fuck out of the walls.
“Torture doesn’t hurt freaks like ye,” he says while sliding a toothpick in his mouth.
“That’s true. It’d save you time and manpower to kill me, actually.” My voice is husky, my jaw bursting with pain when I speak.
“No shit, ye weaselly cunt.” He grabs me by the hair and then lifts my head up. “Heard ye a goddamn fag who’s been sucking Kayden’s cock. Ye do have eyes similar to Caysie’s. He must’ve thought of her while deep-throating ye—”
I headbutt him. Hard.
So hard, I reel from it and blood explodes on his forehead and mine, because my vision is red—literally—rivulets sliding down my nose and into my mouth.
Declan curses, then bursts out laughing. “So ye’re a little quiet psycho until he’s mentioned? Ye don’t like the thought of being Caysie’s replacement?
“I’m no one’s fucking replacement!” I glare up at him, thinking about how to strangle him. Watch the life bleed out of those repugnant eyes.
“Maybe I have a better way to torture ya.” He grins and calls his men, who once again inject me with something.
And then my world turns black again.
31
GARETH
Iwake to the sound of soft, mocking laughter, like a distant echo bouncing off the sterile white walls.
My head is heavy, my limbs bound in the tight grip of a straitjacket. I sit up on the white tiles, the cold digging into my bones. The room smells of suffocating antiseptic, the walls blurring in and out of focus as I try to figure out if I’m in my head.
No.
I’m here. In the real world.
Sitting on the floor. My pants are white, too, like the straitjacket.