Chapter
8

He’d left me in a cage. True to everything he’d told me, he hosed me off like an animal then stuffed me away in the underbelly of his cabin once he was done with me. My crotch burned and I couldn’t move. A singular white bucket was the only furniture in the space. I didn’t want to think of why I’d need the bucket. As large as the basement was, the darkened interior was bare.

And I hadn’t moved for hours.

Or maybe days.

I couldn’t be sure of the passage of time. I glanced around the basement. Nothing. Still nothing but the slender stairs leading to a door where a fragile beam of light was visible at the bottom. I couldn’t even hear Caesar and Sean moving around up there. Left alone with nothing but darkness and silence, the pain magnified. I felt the sting in my fingers, limbs, and core. My sharp teeth bit into my bottom lip as I curled into myself. I trapped a strangled sob in my throat. Crying wouldn’t change my circumstances, and I had no one to rely on to get out but myself. The poor girl in college with dreams in her eyes, clinging to the all-American boy to get out of hell had disappear. I couldn’t get myself out of a wet paper bag. I hadn’t been able to walk away when Caesar came for me.

Hell, part of me had wanted to go.

And that was the rub of it all. Caesar, in one terrifying package, represented everything in my life I knew from my upbringing. The pain. The suffering. The fear of messing up, just so I could maybe survive for a few more days without hell knocking on my door.

For the last decade, all I’d done was survive.

I wanted to live.

“Just help me out a bit, would you? You want Mommy to feel better?”

“Yes, Momma.”

I clutched the syringe in my small hand, just like Momma taught me, and felt for a vein. The small, black holes in the soft flesh inside her elbow sometimes lied. I’d made her blue under the skin by putting the needle in the wrong place. Momma reclined back in her chair and waited for me. I wished Daddy were here, but Momma said he was never coming back. That he’d crashed and burned into a crisp and left us all behind. That he didn’t love us, that was why he died, and I shouldn’t cry over it because he was a bastard. Bastards didn’t deserve tears.

But Momma cried over him all the time.

She did right now. Little crystal tears that stuck to her lashes as she tried to blink them away.

“Hurry up, Ash. The pain is coming. Don’t make Momma hurt.”

No, I didn’t want her to hurt. But I was afraid when the milky-white stuff went into her arm. She didn’t hear me crying, and Trace’s friend was mean. I didn’t like Jason, and Trace wouldn’t help me.

“Maybe I could give you a hug? I give the best hugs. You told me so.”

She reached down and caressed my cheek before she lifted her hand and smacked me.

“You’re worthless, you know that? I don’t want your stupid hugs. You’ll just lie to me like your father. You look like him, you know? Same lying eyes. Same pouty mouth. I hate you.”

My ribs restricted, making it hard to breathe. She didn’t mean that, I knew it. She couldn’t. She told me just this morning I was the best kid ever when I finished cleaning the dishes. But the sting in my cheek told me maybe she told the truth. Maybe this was the real her. I blinked through tears and stuck the needle in her arm. As she rocked back, I pushed the plunger on the syringe and put her medicine in her arm before I removed the needle and placed it on the couch beside her.

“I’m sorry, baby. You know I love you. I’m sorry. It just hurts so bad. So bad.”

She was gone. I knew it when her eyes rolled back in her head and her leg twitched. She’d be like that for hours. I moved her needle and curled against her side. Just four months prior, before Dad went away forever, she used to hold me against her on the couch, a popcorn bowl between us as we watched movies. We’d laugh and play games with the fluffy, golden kernels. Most of the time I couldn’t catch them with my mouth, but we laughed it off and tried again.

A door creaked, and I pushed my face into her cloth-covered breasts. Just a bit longer. I wanted to be with Momma a little longer.

“Come on, Ash. I’ll knock your teeth down your throat if you bite me again.”

I didn’t look up at Momma as I slid from the couch. She didn’t hear anything when she had her medicine. Jason stood in the door, his hulking frame dwarfing my small stature. He wore distressed jeans and no shirt, exposing his muscular abs and thick chest. A thick, black tattoo of Death covered one side of his stomach. That only led me to notice his jeans were opened, the zipper pulled down, the tip of his penis peeking out.

I swallowed the bile rising in my throat.

He lunged forward and gripped my hair. My scalp pinched as I cried out.

“What did I tell you about giving me looks like that? You’ll learn to like that shit. Women are fucking whores, and you’re gonna be mine while you make us money.”

He dragged me up against him. I knew better than to try to fight; it only made it hurt more.

“Come on, Ash. It’ll taste good. I promise.”

No, it wouldn’t. It never did, but nothing would save me. Nothing.

I rolled awake and groaned, the memory fading.

“You whine about Jason in your sleep.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Do you have anything better to do than torture me?” I asked before I could stop myself. The fading tendrils of my dream colored my words, and I opened my eyes to see his face.

Caesar shrugged. “I like a pretty picture when I eat. Besides, it’s been twenty-four hours since I last saw you.”

Twenty-four hours.

I jerked and sat up. My body ached everywhere, but Caesar looked no worse for wear in blue jeans and a white t-shirt. He held a fragrant egg and bacon sandwich that made my mouth water.

“Want some?”

I pressed my lips into a hard line.

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t have any.”

He chuckled at his crude joke, but the sound was eclipsed by my stomach rumbling.

“Sound like someone is hungry. Shouldn’t have been so mean yesterday.”

“Caesar—” He narrowed his eyes at me, and I paused.

“That won’t work on me again.”

“Let me out.”

“Nope. Next demand?”

I fought the urge to scream. What did the police say to do when faced with a captive situation? Make your captor see you as a person.

“My name is Ashlyn Myers. I’m twenty-two years old, and I’m a freshman at Ryder University.”

“The fuck? Why would I care?”

I stared at his quizzical look as he took another bite. “Because I’m a real person, Caesar. The girl in the photo? She was my best friend, and her name was Tamara.”

He finished his bite and pointed at me with his sandwich. “I liked when you called me Lunatic better.”

“Caesar—”

He threw the sandwich at my cage, and I scrambled to eat it. On the floor, and covered in grit, it was the best sandwich I’d ever had.

“Stupid cunt,” he roared, kicking the cage. It rattled under his strength but held as I gulped down my prize.

“Full cunt, now.”

Stupid. So stupid to antagonize him, but I couldn’t play the damsel in distress. Not anymore. Something snapped in me the moment he made me run in that forest. I wanted my freedom back. I wanted to feel the sun on my face and smile at my goofy friends.

Caesar paced next to the cage, and for a moment I could imagine him inside, trapped and taunted.

“You ever serve time, Caesar?”

“Stop calling me that!”

“Yesterday, that was all you wanted to hear,” I tossed back.

“And now you want to follow directions. I think you like the pain, you know that? I think behind all that bravado and bullshit, you’re a pain slut who loved what I did, and you want it again.”

“Caesar?”

“Shut up.”

“Caesar.”

“You’re plucking my nerves.”

“Caesar!”

“How bad did Jason fuck up that head of yours? I want to shake the man’s hand.”

I went silent and felt the blood drain from my face. He didn’t say anything, but he saluted at my reaction. Then, he pulled a slim phone out of his pocket and dialed while he looked at me.

“Speakerphone, just for you,” he told me.

“Yeah, boss?” came a voice on the other end of the line.

“Where’s the quarterback?” he asked.

No.

“Don’t do it,” I whispered.

“About to head home for the night. Need me to do a drive by?” the muffled voice on the phone asked.

“Get one of the boys to make sure he has an accident before he gets home. I’d like that pretty arm of his broken in three places,” Caesar told them.

“Please, I’m sorry,” I begged.

My stomach bottomed out, and I gripped the bars in my hands. Cold metal bit into my palm and I forgot the pain in my body. My anger and rebellion would hurt Matt. All because I couldn’t shut up and do what I was told. I knew better. I fucking knew better.

“Will do, C. Will do,” came the reply on the phone.

“Thank you.” Caesar hung up and glanced at me with a crooked smile. “You still want to play games with me? Next, I’ll have that girl you were with at the theater stretched out for my boys. Would you like that?”

I sank back to the ground and curled into a ball. My bladder screamed, my mind raced, and the stolen food I’d eaten curdled in my stomach. Yes, I was done playing games. Yes, I understood I had nowhere to go. And yes, I knew Caesar had the pieces to a chessboard when I’d been left with checkers. I cringed as Tamara’s face swam into focus in my mind. Anything attached to me got hurt. They faded into the black world I lived in, for simply sharing the air I breathed. If I could, I’d take it all back, but I couldn’t. Even with the danger I knew they would be in, I reached out to people—hungry for some sort of connection that proved I was alive.

When all along I was just an inanimate object, made to be tossed back and forth.

“Damn, my mistake. I see you haven’t used your pot. You must have to piss something fierce. Go ahead, I’ll wait,” Caesar growled at me.

Punishment. Everything with Caesar was punishment or more punishment. The only way I could make it through this was to survive his treatment and look for an opening to escape. I forced myself to my feet and shuffled over to the bucket as he paced with me. That same cruel smile on his face taunted me to get smart, to fight. But I didn’t have the strength. Not now.

Matt wasn’t the only soul Caesar would ruin to get his way.

I sat on the pot and released my bladder, humiliated as he watched me with an unblinking stare. Caesar. My captor. My torture. The end all be all of my existence. And one day I’d escape him.

Even over his dead body.