CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Laurel
I thought I had something to complain about before.
Little did I know that things could get worse.
I never imagined I would fall so hard.
I never envisioned that I could be someone that ended up here.
Yet, as I looked around at the place I had been trapped in for over a week now, I knew that this wasn’t some nightmare that I could shake off.
This was real.
And I was the one caught and trapped by a lock and a bunch of bars. Oh, and I couldn’t forget about the crazy man. The dirty one that looked completely off his rocker. The one that watched me with dark, lifeless eyes.
I was naked but I think at this point I wasn’t even fazed by it. After all, it was the least of my worries.
Bryan called me his Queen. He treated me like one in his own way. But right now, I was far from sitting on a royal throne. I was a prisoner. I was a gilded bird trapped in a cage. Quite literally on the cage part.
A cage that felt like it was made for a midget. Little person? I wasn’t sure which was more politically correct. I supposed I should have taken notice of such things, but it wasn’t like I was faced with that in my life, really.
I didn’t have enough room to fully stand up, so if I wanted to stretch my legs, I had to walk around hunched over. Not that there was much room to walk anyway. Not even five feet by five feet, meaning the so-called bed that was at one end wasn’t nearly long enough for me to spread out in.
I had a bucket in the corner to use… for things that I never imagined doing out in the open. But here I had no choice. Just like I had no choice to do it when the creepy man was sitting there watching my every move.
So far, it seemed like this was a one-manned operation. There hadn’t been anyone else that entered the room. And the place wasn’t soundproof at all. The only voice I had heard this whole time was his. Even as he moved around the house cooking, watching TV, and oddly even vacuuming. Which you would have maybe thought that would have made it easier to escape. But it didn’t matter if I knew where he was because I was locked in this cage.
Locked.
The key? I had no idea because I hadn’t seen one for the big door of the cage yet. These cages had been built with the type of smartness that could only have come from someone that was mentally unstable. And yes, there were three of them in the room I was in. Mine was dead center. The others were empty though and I feared the day they would be filled. What would that mean for me? I supposed that was a bit selfish to think, but it was my life on the line and all. I wouldn’t doubt that when he got a shiny new toy that the old one would be forgotten about.
Back to the cages. They had a smaller door in the corner where the bucket was. The space was only big enough so he could remove the bucket to clean and then replace it. From what I had seen so far, there was no escape for me. I was tiny, but not nearly small enough to slip through that little opening.
Not even if I kept wasting away.
He fed me, sure. At first, I refused to eat. But I knew I needed to keep up my strength. So I took his taunting and cruelty. And when he brought a bag of cheap, flat hamburgers in, I made a decision on the third day. He laughed and shoved his mouth full of those burgers. They actually smelled so good that my mouth watered. I knew I was desperate then because that smell should have made me think of how bad they were for me. But it didn’t and all I could think about was knowing if they tasted as good as they smelled.
He threw the last little bites through the bars of the cage and I scrambled to get to them, pushing them into my mouth without an ounce of hesitation. There wasn’t a moment to care about anything else. Not the fact that those little morsels had his germs all over them. Or that they had bounced off of the dirty cage floor. Or that a few of them had actually hit the outside of my waste bucket. I didn’t care. I dove after each one as he tossed them in. I had no idea that one could consume so many burgers at once, but he did.
In the end, I think I might have actually gotten enough to make a full burger. It didn’t feel like it was enough but it was something at least.
“I wonder how he would feel if he could see you now?” the crazy man asked. Though, I didn’t think he was really looking for an answer.
I wasn’t sure if he was aware of it or not, but he sort of clued me in just a little. I was here because of someone. I imagined that by his tone this was his way to get back at someone. Take something from this person that had wronged him. Or cut him down? I had no idea. Just like I didn’t have the first clue as to the he that he was referring to.
At first thought, I would have said it might have been my father that he could have been talking about. Sure my family made a lot of people mad. For stupid reason sometimes too. Like the fact that we had wealth. However, that didn’t really make sense seeing as I’d been cut off from my family.
That led me down a path of wondering what would happen if my dad found out I had been kidnapped. Would he be sad? Would he do everything in his power to get me back? Would he shrug and turn the other way?
I didn’t even have to imagine what my mother would do. Deep down, I knew she had already washed her hands of me.
I couldn’t stop the tears as they rolled down my cheeks. I would like to have said that this was the first time that I had broken down and cried, but it wasn’t. It probably wasn’t even the tenth. I hated that I had let myself crack so many times here in this stupid, dirty cage.
I curled up on the bed and willed myself to sleep, praying that he would just leave.
I woke to an empty room. My hips ached. My calves were cramping. My knees burned from being bent all night. There was a crick in my neck and my hands were numb from using them as a pillow for so long. But I was alone. I didn’t have his dirty, creepy eyes on me and I felt like I could breathe for a second.
All the negativity seeped in then. There was no one looking for me. I’d been a pretty crappy person and admitting that did me no good right now. It wasn’t like I could deny it though or push the thought away. I had the people I worked with but we didn’t really hang out or call one another. We didn’t make plans to do things that weren’t work-related. Maybe if I had tried harder. Let my guard down a little more. I was sure that to them I must have still seemed like some stuck-up princess.
Thinking that only made me think of Bryan. He wasn’t far off at all the first time he had met me. Back when I had it all. The car. The family money. The huge ring on my finger and the easy future ahead of me. One where I didn’t have to worry about anything. I was the pampered princess. And now I had fallen so hard.
There was no sense in dwelling on all that right this moment.
But Bryan.
Sweet, gruff Bryan. The odd mix that made a perfect man. The one that I had lost.
I was so stupid and I knew that eventually I would push far enough for him to snap. To be fair, that hadn’t been my intention that night. I had been confused for so long. I had convinced myself that he didn’t care about me because how could he? I was just something to conquer. To play with. To pity. Right?
Perhaps I had been wrong all along.
Maybe those moments when I saw a softness flash in his eyes wasn’t just me wishing that I had seen something there. Could it have been real? I wanted it to be.
Only wanting hadn’t gotten me anywhere lately.
It didn’t matter now because it was clear that night. He had made his decision to cut me loose and I didn’t take him as the kind of person that wouldn’t hold true to something once he had it in his mind. It was set in stone. And I had been left behind.
I missed him and I feared I would never be able to tell him how I really felt. I would never be able to thank him for everything he did for me. I would never feel his strong arms around me again.
Those arms, they made me feel so safe and warm. I wished more than anything I could be wrapped in them just one more time. And have his low voice in my ear, whispering things that made me blush and feel like a queen all at the same time. Those words that I had just realized weren’t meaningless. They weren’t simply things he had said to get me out of my clothes.
I swallowed hard, trying to keep the tears at bay because I had been hit with a hard dose of reality. Whether or not he meant the things he had said to me, well, I would never know. Because there was no way out of this that I could see.
How much more of this could I take?
How long was I going to be here?
The time trickled on so slow. There was a sliver of light that came in from the top of the curtain that covered the only window in the room. I had no idea where I was or if there was anything around. Once, I thought about screaming but then I feared what would happen if I did. I knew that he would get to me before anyone outside would. If there was even someone around to hear me, that was.
One time I heard a lawnmower and it gave me a little spark of hope. But the fact that my captor stayed out of the room the whole time it was running made me think that it was just him taking care of the yard. I thought it was strange. Some of the things he did. Like if that had been him cutting the grass, he must have not been so crazy, maybe. He did mundane things. Even though this room wasn’t the cleanest, I had heard him moving about the house cleaning before.
I tried my hardest not to think of that man all that much. He made my skin crawl when he was in the room with me. But when he left, I was always on edge wondering when he was going to come back. I didn’t know why he took me and his words earlier confused me even more.
More days passed. I counted them thanks to that space above the window that allowed me to see when the sun rose and fell each day. I wondered if I would be here long enough to lose track of time. If one morning I would just wake up and forget what day I was on.
“Why am I here?” I asked boldly one day.
He was sitting there sharpening a knife and I suddenly thought that maybe I had picked the wrong time to grow a backbone.
His eyes cut up to look at me, but he said nothing.
“If it’s money you want, I’m sure you are not going to get it. In case you are not aware, I haven’t spoken to my family in months and I am currently very much broke.”
“Fuck your money,” he said and there was a cold edge to his tone. “I don’t want money. This isn’t about fucking money!”
He was starting to get mad. I guess I hadn’t really thought of what kind of reaction I was going to get. Then again, I hadn’t really been thinking at all when I opened my mouth.
Maybe I was tired. I was done with whatever little game he had going on here. I wanted out, whatever way that may be. There was no way I was going to make it here for months. Or years even.
If I thought living in a tiny box surrounded by drug dealers was a shock, it was nothing compared to being in this cage. How I would have given anything just to be able to stand up straight for two minutes.
“Then what is it about?” I asked and this time I made sure that I kept my voice calm and even.
I needed to understand why I was here. I needed to know the reasons why he locked me in a cage. I had to know why all of this was happening to me.
“You see,” he said, the left side of his face twitching a little. “Something was taken from me and I deserve some payback, don’t you think?”
“And that has to do with me how?”
“You were the one thing I could get to.”
“Oh,” I said and blew out a frustrated breath of air.
There was a lingering silence that fell between us. I sat there on the floor, my legs curled up against my chest. He went back to sharpening his knife and the sound began to hurt my ears.
Then my mind started to shoot off in all directions.
This guy took me to get back at someone or something. I wasn’t sure on that last part. But he did take me to make a point. Only, I didn’t even know if anyone knew I was missing. Did he know that as well? Had we really been sitting here all this time waiting and well, it was kind of pointless.
“Um,” I said and licked my dry lips. The sound ceased again and I was thankful. “Do they—or whoever—know that I’m missing?”
That was the moment I saw the truth. His shoulders slumped and his face fell. It was almost like he had just realized that he hadn’t thought about that part of his plan.
“It’s just that, well, sometimes I can be a bit… flaky… and I’m not really the best at getting back to people.” I shook my head because I felt that this was partially on me. Which made no sense. It wasn’t my fault that this guy kidnapped me. Or that I was somehow caught up in something I knew nothing about. “So… there is a chance that no one knows that you have… taken me.”
I tried to put it as delicately as possible.
If looks could kill…
It would have been a death by fire, that was for sure.
Because as his eyes looked up and met mine again, there was a blaze hotter than Hell burning in them.
I should have just kept my mouth shut.
“Maybe I should cut off one of your fingers. If I send it to them, you think they will know you’re missing then?!”
He abruptly stood up, knocking the cheap, metal chair over and causing a loud ruckus that made me flinch.
I swallowed hard.
Yes, I was sure that would make them very much aware.
Only I hoped that he wouldn’t actually go that far.
But luckily, he turned on his heels and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
I sat there and tried to calm my breathing.
I feared what was to come.
And again, I only had myself to blame.