Imagine that. Choking to death on a used, dirty sock.
“I know this is tough.” Rinaldo sighs and shakes his head. “I understand you must be afraid. But trust me, Karah. I’m going to take care of you.” He grins and winks. “Now you be good and I’ll be back soon.”
He walks to the door, turns off the lights, and leaves me in the early morning gloom as patches of sunlight break through the closed curtains.
I sit there for a long second staring at the empty motel room as the rope chafes the skin around my neck. It’s itchy and tight and painful, and the old bruises from where Rinaldo first tried to choke me are faded and nearly gone now, but the rope threatens to break them open anew.
The belt on my wrists is looser, and I think I can slip it off if I try. I wriggle it slightly, testing the limits. I wait for a few minutes, just to make sure he’s not coming back right away, before I start to work my hands back and forth, flexing my muscles and wrists and arms.
It hurts like hell. The rough, hard leather bites into my soft flesh and I strain against it, trying to force it to loosen enough to let my hand pull free. I wiggle and writhe, yanking, pushing, pulling, and I grunt as I do it. The rope tugs at my throat and the sock moves deeper into my mouth toward my throat and sweat rolls down my skin.
I can’t get it. God damn it, I can’t get it. I struggle harder, desperate to get free of this, terrified of what Rinaldo’s going to do to me once he comes back. I’m at his mercy here on the bed, leashed and bound, and I don’t think he’ll hesitate to do something terrible—to hurt me, to defile me, or worse.
To kill me slowly and to make it hurt.
I don’t know when he’ll come back. That’s the biggest problem: it could be soon or it could be hours still, and I have no way to tell time. The clock on the bedside table’s been unplugged and flipped over like he planned for this exact situation. I’m not even sure what he’s doing out there, but I can’t give up. I can’t lie here and wait to die.
Flashes of the night before rush through my brain. Nico killing Papa. The topless girls in the pool. The front gate guard sleeping. The brightness of the van’s lights.
The memory coming back like a hammer against my skull.
What’s real? What happened?
I sit there panting through my nose slick with sweat, my wrists and hands aching, my bonds still tight and holding.
How can I trust anything in my head right now?
I don’t know what’s happening to me. I keep cycling from Nico to Papa to Momma to Nico and around and around in circles, all of their faces blending and blurring, their hands and bodies and distended throats shifting from one to the next, and I’m not sure who’s killing who and if anything is real.
If I’m losing my mind, how do I know that I’m really in this room with Rinaldo?
I’m dizzy with the thought. How can I trust myself right now when I don’t even know what memory really happened?
I’m trapped inside my brain. I want to find a way to get outside of myself, to find out what’s real and what isn’t, what I can trust and what I can’t, but the memories are all jumbled and I’m in so much pain I can barely stand it. I give up and sit back, staring at the ceiling, and I close my eyes, trying to picture the truth—
But there is no truth.
I see Nico killing Papa. I see Papa killing Momma. I see both things happening at the same time.
Why didn’t I scream?
Why didn’t I do something?
I could’ve saved them. First Momma, then Papa.
But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and watched the life get throttled from them and now both my parents are dead, both of them are gone, both of them are memories—poor memories, facsimiles of memories, like copies of a copy degraded so much as to be worthless.
And through it all, there’s Nico and the strange, pathetic yearning I still feel for him.
I want Nico to save me.
How fucked up is that?
I watched my husband strangle my father to death and now I want him to come swoop in to my rescue. But that’s not going to happen. Papa’s body will be found and someone will realize that Nico did it, and one of my brothers will put a bullet in his brain.
My husband’s probably already dead.
Which makes me a widow.
God, a widow. I got hours of happiness—not even a full day. Hours of joy punctuated with death.