“You be a good little pussy for us, and we’ll bring you a steak dinner.” Low Voice cackled in my ear. “Would you like that, boy? Big juicy steak dinner?”
I closed my eyes.
“Get him ready for me,” said another evil voice.
Tattoo. His voice was the slimiest, the most demonic, the most evil. If it had a color, it would be black with red splotches. That’s the color I imagined when I heard him speak, as if evil were speaking.
And of course it was evil speaking.
I had ceased thinking of these three people as human. No human could do what they did.
I was biding my time. How long would it be before they got tired of me, killed me, and chopped me into splintering pieces like they had done to Luke?
I hoped it would be soon.
“I’ll get him ready for you,” Low Voice said. “I’ll get him nice and lubed up.”
I trembled, my body quaking. I didn’t want to tremble, but my body did it of its own accord. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what was going to happen. Not like the first time, when they had completely surprised me, completely destroyed my belief in anything good in the world.
“Assume the position, bitch,” Low Voice said.
Assume the position. Those dreaded words. It meant to get on my hands and knees.
I braced for the pain. The inevitable pain.
But it wasn’t the pain I felt first. It was his hot, rank breath on the back of my neck. Raspy breath, wheezing, a timeless breeze as I waited, suspended, for the sharp pain that would soon come. Like a metal spike, it did come. And I cried out.
“That’s it, bitch. Yeah,” Low Voice groaned.
I detached. Like I always did. Although it wasn’t Tattoo, I always went to the bird. Colorful bird that I could focus on to get through the pain, the humiliation.
I had learned to see the bird on all of their forearms. And it helped.
So I focused on it, willing my mind to soar out of my body, like the phoenix rising from its ashes. Was the only way to get through it.
Though outside my body, I heard myself cry out.
They liked it when I cried out. If I didn’t, they would clock me upside the head or beat my ass. More pain, more humiliation. Still, I’d have given anything not to cry out, not to give them that satisfaction.
I was the little bitch they said I was. I couldn’t control my reactions.
God… God…
“No, no, no, no, no!”
* * *
I was back in Dr. Carmichael’s office, clenching the chair, perspiration emerging on my forehead and dripping down my cheeks.
Or was it tears?
“Easy, Talon,” she said in a soothing voice. “We don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”
“God. I was there. I was fucking there.”
“You were. We were making progress.”
“What pulled me out?”