5
Valentine’s man drags me from the room, still dressed in a hospital gown and I can feel my limbs protest with the movements. My abdomen twinges and pulls, the stitches moving too much, I can feel the wound beginning to reopen, the warmth of my blood seeping through the front of the gown.
“Stop,” I beg, but he doesn’t, if anything, the grip on my arm only increases, his pace becoming faster to the point my feet drag more than step across the carpet. It burns my bare feet and the pain pulsing through my body makes the edges of my vision turn black, a thick fog pushing in at the sides.
We walk for what feels like forever, down endless corridors and past opulent rooms, until we hit a door and I’m forced down a steep flight of concrete stairs. The steps are freezing beneath the soles of my feet, grit and sharp gravel biting into my skin. When we make it to the bottom, the hallway before me is barely big enough to fit two people side by side, the light dim and almost murky. We only stop when he roughly twists me and shoves me into a small room.
The door slams behind me, the noise ricocheting off the walls. A single, metal framed cot sits in the centre of the small cube of a room, an old dirty mattress on top with a single, thin sheet folded at the bottom. No pillows.
The light buzzes overhead, dangling there from a wire that has seen better days. There’s condensation on the walls, tiny beads of water that cling to the concrete walls and it smells of mold and rot, the stench of death permanently etched into the walls. There are dark patches staining the floor and the color gives away to what it was that was spilled.
Blood.
A lot of blood. Through the door I hear feminine whimpers, cries for help, screams and sobs. There are more women down here, I didn’t get a good look when he dragged me down here, too focused on trying not to pass out from the pain but now I’m alone I hear them. I hear all of them.
What the fuck is this place? I swallow down the panic and fear rising like bile in my throat and scan the room once more.
Apart from that rotten bed, there isn’t much else in here. There’s a sink that used to be white but is now stained brown and yellow, the tap constantly dripping water. There are no windows in here but I’d already figured that. We were underground, way underground with no way out apart from that one door we came through.
I press my hand to my abdomen, looking down at the red splotches. With the door closed, I pull up the gown to check it out. There’s a thick padded plaster over the stitches, but the blood has seeped through that and onto the gown. I carefully peel away the edges, hissing as the adhesive tugs at the bruised skin around the edges. The wound is clean but it’s bleeding, not terribly but I can see the stitches have pulled away. The area around where the bullet tore through me is purple, black, yellow, matching the rest of my body. Bruises and scratches cover a lot of the parts of my body that I can see but I didn’t doubt the parts I couldn’t see looked in much the same state if how sore I was, was anything to go by.
Pressing the gauze back down gently, I trudge to the bed, gritting my teeth as I lower myself onto the cot, too weak to care about the state of the furniture. I suck in a breath, holding it as plumes of dust puff out from the mattress, stinking of rot and decay and only when it settles do I let out the breath.
“Please,” I hear a voice just outside the door, “Please no!” The voice appears young, far too innocent to be in a place like this. Loud bangs and further cries echo down the halls, growing quieter as whoever it is, is dragged further away.
My stomach rolls at the hideous ideas forming in my head, prostitution rings, human trafficking being the main ones. Girls went missing all the time, never to be found again and it’s things like that, the insidious darkness that prays on young girls and women that usually get them. Most get falsely declared dead, no evidence to ever suggest such a thing happened and once they’re declared dead, they’re forgotten, leaving them to this evil.
This world is a cruel, harsh place, the people in it even more so. There are monsters everywhere, there’s no escaping them and sometimes you have to join them in order to survive.
I’ve chosen my monster.
And it isn’t Valentine.
He may be my blood but he is not my family.
Given the chance I will pull the trigger myself.
Exhaustion tugs at my consciousness and I can feel my body sagging, bowing over to the side as I try and fail to fight the grips of sleep. The sheets smell of damp, a musky sent that makes it hard to breathe easily but it doesn’t stop my eyes from falling closed.
Just five minutes. I can take five minutes to rest.
I bolt up in the bed to the sound of a scream so gutting it tears through me. Goose bumps rise on my arms and my stomach churns with the noise. Very male grunts and groans fill in the gaps between the cries and I have no doubt in my mind exactly what is going on here.
Valentine truly was evil, dabbling into this sort of thing is a sure way to have your soul ripped from your body.
Bile rises in my throat, burning my tongue but I don’t vomit, there’s nothing in me to even bring up, so I sit there and I listen, unable to help the poor girl down the hall.
Eventually her cries die down, becoming gurgled and muffled but the man in her room continues, his booms of pleasure turning my blood to fire. I want to kill him. The burning rage blinds me, makes me into something I’ve never been and I welcome it.
I welcome that darkness, the claws of it seeping into my mind as I imagine ripping the mans’ throat out with my bare hands, watching him bleed on the floor. Reveling in the warm, crimson liquid coating my skin, relishing how quickly the light drains from his eyes.
What would Lex do? Tear out his organs whilst he made him watch? Cut off his cock and feed it to him?
Lex was a lot of things, but I knew he wouldn’t do this. The man may be evil, but this level of evil is saved for the likes of Valentine. The ones so deprived and soulless not even hell would want them.
A door slams and before, I couldn’t figure out where the sounds were coming from, but the slam is right next to me, the room over. It’ll be why her cries were so loud and his grunts so nauseating. His feet pound heavily on the concrete floor and my heart leaps up into my throat when they stop right outside my door.
I swear I hear his heavy breaths through the door. My fear is thick but there is no damn well way I’ll let him touch me.