She hesitated behind him and then repeated his name quietly. He heard her ascending the stairs and then heard a door open and close upstairs. It sounded like several locks were engaging. Zach blew out a long breath just as he heard a car pulling into the gravel driveway. The criminalist had arrived. He hoped Josie would sleep well despite the circumstances. As for himself, he didn’t expect to sleep at all.
What sick fuck does this to a woman who has already endured enough personal hell to last a lifetime?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Before
Marshall’s feet sounded like they were dragging on the stairs. Josie pulled herself up, a spear of pain traveling through her neck. She’d been sleeping with it lolling to the right and it hurt to straighten. She tensed at the sound of scuffling outside the room, coming more fully awake as the door opened and Marshall wrestled something inside. A mattress? But why? Her mind went blank. She didn’t know what to think.
He carried it to where she sat against the wall. “Move over,” he said, and she tried to scoot her body sideways as much as she could despite the chains. He leaned the mattress against the wall and placed a plastic bag he’d had hanging on his wrist on the floor. Josie watched as he removed some sort of cleaning spray, the smell of bleach filling her nostrils as he sprayed the floor where she’d been sleeping and wiped it dry with paper towels. Why had he done that? Was he giving her a cleaner place to sleep, or was he trying to remove the DNA he’d left behind each time he’d violated her in that exact spot?
“Climb on and I’ll move it back,” he said. She did as he asked and he pushed the mattress until it hit the wall, Josie sitting on the soft foam instead of the hard floor. For a moment she thought she might weep, both with the relief of having something soft beneath her, and the fear of what this might mean. He wasn’t going to let her go anytime soon. He was making her more comfortable where she was.
“Why did you bring this?”
His hazel eyes moved to hers. “It seemed like . . .” His words drifted off as though he didn’t know how to answer the question, hadn’t thought about how to articulate it.
“It’s very nice,” she said quickly. “I appreciate it. I just wondered why you thought of it.”
Her comment seemed to take him off balance, his eyes narrowing as he glanced around the room as though looking for an answer that satisfied him. “Because I’m tired of the hard floor under my knees while I’m fucking you.”
A shudder went down her spine. She’d made him feel some way he didn’t like, and in return, he’d verbally stabbed her. What was it that upset him? The insinuation that he’d done somethin
g nice for her simply because he’d wanted to? She didn’t know, and she was too tired and starved to care. “Did you bring food?” she asked, her voice rough and dry from lack of use, lack of hydration.
He went back out and grabbed a bag he must have set down to unlock the door and drag the mattress in. He fed her, gave her water. He wiped her mouth. She didn’t look at him but she felt his eyes on the side of her face, measuring.
“I think about you d-down here when I’m in my b-bed at night. I get turned on,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I t-touch myself and pretend it’s you, that your h-hands aren’t chained behind your back. That I’m just me, and you’re just you, and that you want me too.”
She turned her head, her gaze finding his. Should she try to play this angle? Attempt to convince him they could be together? She swallowed. What did she have to lose? “Maybe we could—”
“Don’t even t-try it. I’m not stupid, J-Josie. You don’t even know what I l-look like under this mask.” He used his hand to wave over his masked face. “I could be a l-leper for all you know.”
She knew he wasn’t, but that was hardly the reason she didn’t desire him. She almost laughed at the sick absurdity. She didn’t desire him because he was a monster. She was tempted to ask him to remove the mask, to give her a chance to convince him she really could be with him willingly. But that mask—the belief that she didn’t know who he was—was the only reason he might let her go at some point. Plus, he already knew she wasn’t interested in the real him—she’d practically run from him each time he’d approached her in the building where they lived. That life that seemed so distant now. So unreal.
He sat staring at her, tilting his head. “Do you think I was always s-sick, Josie? Or do you think they m-made me this way?”
“Who? Who made you this way?”
He looked up at the window, the streetlight beyond bright enough to illuminate the room in ashen shadows. “The people who were supposed to give a fuck about me.”
Her muscles felt tight. “I don’t know. But . . . but you can change now. You can be whoever you want to be. I haven’t seen your face. I don’t know your name or where you come from. If you let me go, you can live the life you want to. Be better. We both will. We’ll both be better. Okay?”
He didn’t react to what she’d said, acted as though he hadn’t even heard her. But after a moment, he murmured, “No. No, I c-can’t be. Not anymore. I’m too f-far gone. Even I know it.”
“That’s not true.”
He shook his head and she got the notion he was frowning under his mask. He sighed, a weary sound. “It is. It is t-true.” And with that, he got up and left, leaving her alone on the mattress he’d brought her. It was more than she’d had, and she was grateful for the warmth and softness it provided. Grateful. The thought made her want to laugh. But she didn’t think she knew how to laugh anymore.
Josie slept. And woke. She still yelled sometimes, but not much anymore. She hadn’t heard a sound other than Marshall coming and going. Sometimes she sang to herself, every song she could bring to mind, ones from childhood and current songs she’d liked on the radio. Time melted, the days spun slowly by. She melted. The weather got warmer. Sometimes it was stifling in her small cell.
The smell of the uncleaned bucket made the room reek. Her world had been reduced to fear, despondency, hunger, fatigue, and thirst. I’m nothing but an animal, she thought.
There was no schedule to Marshall’s visits. Sometimes she was sure she’d die of hunger or thirst, but then he’d show up with food and water, bringing her back to life, though she wasn’t sure she was glad of that or not. She tried to engage him and sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not.
A green and yellow leaf stuck to the window for a minute before a breeze peeled it away once more and it cartwheeled off to somewhere beyond. Free. It was almost fall. She thought she’d been in the square cement room for four months. A thought wound its way through her mind, a red ribbon of dread. She tried to push it away, tried to fall back to sleep, her only place of refuge, of peace. But it would not let go, it demanded to be heard. It had been four months, maybe longer, and Josie had not gotten her period once.
Terror gripped her and she sobbed.