When the door to her cell finally scraped open Josie lifted her head from Ray’s corpse, disoriented and blinded by the soft, hazy light that crept in, and scrambled to her feet, swaying on unsteady legs. One hand covered her eyes. She squinted and then blinked rapidly, trying to bring Gosnell’s looming figure into focus. He was just a black, man-shaped shadow filling up the doorway. His voice boomed inside the tiny space, “He dead yet?”

She didn’t speak, trying to take in the room around her between the colored light spots that assaulted her eyes. The walls were cinderblock, as she had suspected, but painted red. The wooden fold-down slab was just as she had pictured it. The toilet was a grime-covered white. She purposely kept her gaze away from Ray’s prone form. She didn’t think she could bear it. If she saw him—what Gosnell had done to him—she would lose control and have nothing left to fight the man who stood before her.

His shadowy hand beckoned. “Come on, then,” he said.

“No.” Her voice sounded like a door creaking.

Gosnell’s black form moved closer. “What did you say to me, girl?”

She gathered what little saliva there was in her mouth, swallowed and said, “I said, NO.”

His laughter was like a foul smell filling up the tiny space. “Girls don’t say no to me, honey.”

He came at her then, faster and more agile than she anticipated. Or maybe she was just weaker and more dazed than she thought. She struck the soft flesh of his torso but it had no effect as he grabbed a handful of her hair and dragged her out of the cell. The wound at the back of her head threatened to pull open and tear her scalp apart. She screamed in spite of herself, her feet scrambling to keep up with him. Outside the tiny cell, he tossed her and she landed on something high and soft. A bed, she realized once she had a chance to take in her surroundings—a king-sized, four-poster bed.

The room was large and oblong, with the bed taking up one corner of the rectangle. From it, Josie could see the entire length of the room. It was windowless and decorated like a living room; couches lined one wall with at least three small end tables, and small lamps sat on each, casting a soft, golden glow over the room. The floor was covered in an old brown shag carpet. Along the same wall as the bed, to her left, was a door slightly ajar, revealing a toilet and what looked like a shower curtain. A bathroom. The wall across from the couches held four doors, each one wallpapered in an outdated floral purple and white print to look as though it was part of the wall. Only the seams and the lever handles on each one gave them away. Mortise locks atop reinforced steel panels were affixed beside each door handle. Above them were sliding deadbolts.

Four doors.

Her heart stopped, beat twice, skipped and then kicked into overdrive. Four doors. That meant there could be four women there at any given time, possibly more if they were sharing cells. How many women had Gosnell kept over the years? How many women were here right now?

She blinked, trying to get the soft blur of the room to come into sharper focus. Gosnell was on the other end of the room, leaning over a small refrigerator that she hadn’t noticed. Next to it was a heavy exterior panel door. That must be the exit. On the other side of the fridge was a white cabinet with glass doors holding what looked like vials of medication and unused needles. The sedatives.

He turned and sauntered back to her, a beer can in his hand. He opened it with a snap that sounded oddly muted. There was a strange absence of sound in the place. As if every noise was instantly absorbed by the walls and the earth beyond it. No wonder her screams had been useless. As he came closer, into the circle of light cast by the bedside lamp, she saw just how dark and ugly his black eye was. It looked even worse than when she’d seen it on television.

“Did Isabelle Coleman do that to your eye?” she asked.

The leering smile playing on his face collapsed. Anger flared in his eyes. He took a long swig of beer and looked her over, as if deciding what he wanted to do to her first. She never felt such revulsion in her life. It was like a thousand insects trying to crawl out of her skin. He held the can of beer in one hand and, with the other, loosened the belt of his jeans. Did she have the strength and stamina to rush him? Her eyes panned the room again, looking for weapons. She could use one of the lamps, perhaps. They didn’t look heavy, but the cords could wrap around his disgusting fat neck. Gosnell was big though—husky and round and probably strong with it. She realized she would have to get him talking if she was going to have time to figure out just what the hell she was going to do, and how she was going to do it.

“Did Sherri watch?” she asked.

The fingers fumbling for his zipper paused. He smiled at her. “What?”

“Your wife. She helped you. Did she like it? She brought you the girls, right?”

“She brought me girls because that’s what I told her to do. She didn’t like to watch. I made her watch sometimes, but she didn’t like it. She knew better than to say anything. Sherri was a good girl.”

His hand moved away from his pants and motioned toward the wallpapered cell doors. “How about you? Do you like to watch?”

Her head turned in the direction of the doors. When she looked back at him, she noticed his face was flushed. He looked excited, hungry. He put his beer down and came to the foot of the bed. One of his hands touched her ankle, his fingers sliding under her pant leg to touch bare skin.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she said, kicking at his hand.

He moved quickly for a large man, climbing onto the bed and straddling her. The weight of him on top of her crushed her hips. She tried to buck him off but she was too weak. He held her wrists in his hands, squeezing so hard she could feel them bruising.

“I said, don’t touch me,” she gasped.

“Nobody tells me what to do,” he said.

Get him to talk, a voice in her head commanded. Against every fiber in her body screaming to fight, she forced herself to relax a bit. He smiled down at her, his hands still gripping her wrists.

“I do whatever I want,” he said proudly. “Not just in here. Out there too. I never pay for anything anymore. Never get a speeding ticket. I punched some guy out in a bar last month and never even got arrested. Cops came and saw it was me and let me go.” He laughed. “Guy needed seven stitches in his face. Get my taxes done free. There’s one bar I drink at—always drink for free there. Everywhere I go, it’s like I’m a king.”

“Because they want to keep coming back…”—she nearly choked—“… for more?”

He rocked back and forth on top of her, grinding into her. She couldn’t keep the repulsion from her face, which only made him laugh. “Well, sure, but mostly because they’re afraid of what I got on them. They all got wives and girlfriends and families and shit.” He let go of one of her wrists and pointed toward the door to outside. Josie could just make it out over his shoulder. “There,” he said, pointing to a small black camera affixed to the wall above the door. “My camera takes their picture as soon as they walk in. I have a record of who comes and how many times and what they do while they’re here.”

He took hold of her free wrist again and pinned her hands to the bed above her head. His breath was hot and smelly against her cheek as he laid himself on top of her. “And no one wants to be the one who takes me down.”

She turned her face away from his, so she didn’t have to see his beady eyes. Just keep him talking. As one of his hands reached down into the waistband of her pants, she forced out a question. “Where did you come up with it?”

“Jesus Christ, you talk a lot,” he complained. He sighed heavily, sat back up and let go of her hands. She immediately held them up in front of her. The relief she felt at having a bit of distance between them was palpable. “My dad,” he said. “It’s kind of a family business.” Her waistband momentarily forgotten, he reached down into his undone jeans, working his hand inside of them.

Josie thought of Alton Gosnell nestled safely and comfortably inside Rockview, just a few doors down the hall from her grandmother, and wanted to retch. So his father had started it. Taking his larynx seemed the least Sherri could do. “And your mom?”

His hand froze. A shadow passed over his face. After a few seconds he heaved himself off her and retrieved his beer. Josie scrambled up onto her knees.

Gosnell said, “She didn’t help. She didn’t know how to act. My dad had to put her down.”

“But you didn’t have that problem with Sherri,” she prompted.

His smile returned, faintly. “Sherri was a good girl.” The shadow returned. “Then that little cunt killed her.”

“June Spencer?”

“I let her out. We had the new one anyway. There wasn’t enough room. Sent her up to Donald. Then she goes and kills my Sherri.”

So June had been here.

“Was Donald one of your…”—she searched for the right word, every choice making her cringe, and settled on—“… regulars?”

He sipped the beer, suddenly in no hurry to get into her pants. He was enjoying this, she realized. Bragging about his sick enterprise. “Yeah, he was. Took a liking to June. When her time was up, he asked if he could take her. I told him he had to pay me for her. Two thousand dollars he offered. I took it. Easier than digging a hole.”

A fresh wave of dizziness washed over her. So, he killed them. What else would a man like Gosnell do with his chattel? “Was she the only one you sold?”

“Yeah. I didn’t need to get into all that. I make enough here with my girls.”

He started to leer at her again, his hand working harder inside his pants this time, so she said, “It must have been hard. Losing Sherri like that.”

His face colored with anger. The beer can hurtled toward her face, glancing off the wall beside her head. He leveled a finger at her. “Shut up already, would you?”

He took a breath, turned away from her, and stumbling, headed back to the fridge, next to the cabinet of vials and needles. Josie wondered how drunk he was and forged onward. “Sherri administered the drugs, didn’t she? To your girls? She was a nurse. She would have been used to giving needles.”

He took another beer from the fridge and slammed the door shut. He snapped the beer can open. “I said, shut up. You fucking talk too much.”

“Where did you get the drugs?” Josie asked, trying to keep him talking so he wouldn’t touch himself anymore—or, more importantly, her. “You must have needed a pretty steady supply. Your regulars—you had to have a doctor or a pharmacist, maybe more than one, as regular clients. Who’s your supplier?”

He ignored her, chugging his beer down but keeping one eye on her.

“You can’t do it, can you? Administer the drugs without Sherri?”

This beer can, fuller than the last one, hit her shoulder as she tried avoiding it and landed on the bed, its contents spilling onto the sheet. “You don’t listen for shit, do you?” he growled.

“What will you do now?” she pressed on. “You and Sherri never had kids. There’s no one to help you carry on the family business.”

Shaking his head, he went back to the fridge to get another beer. “You better shut up about my wife,” he muttered.

“What happened? She couldn’t have children? Or she didn’t want to have children with you? Or was it you? You couldn’t give her children?”

Josie narrowly avoided the full beer can as it smashed into the wall above her head, leaving a gash in the drywall and spraying liquid all over her. He advanced on her, again pointing accusingly. “I told you to shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Sherri had a tumor when she was nineteen. They had to tie up her female parts. There’s not a goddamn thing wrong with me.”

She felt a small kernel of sympathy for Sherri, which was quickly pushed aside by fear and disgust as Nick freed his penis from his pants and pumped it a few more times. He climbed onto the bed. On her knees, Josie shrank back, away from him. “I’ll show you how good it works,” he said. “No more talking. Now you’re gonna do what I tell you.”

She hoped he couldn’t see her trembling. She was staring into his good eye. She would have to let him get close again. It was the only way. If he couldn’t see her, he couldn’t catch her. From a drawer in one of the end tables he pulled a length of rope, which he used to tie her hands to the nearest bed post at the head of the bed. She struggled, fingers flying at his face, trying to reach his eyes, then balled into fists trying to hit any soft or sensitive target she could. He slammed her head into the wall until she stopped, stars floating in front of her eyes. Then he finished tying her wrists and started yanking her pants down. A gateway in Josie’s mind creaked open. The place she went when bad things happened. She hadn’t needed it for many years. She never thought she’d need it again. As Gosnell climbed on top of her once more, she stepped through it.

A pounding on the door froze them both in place.