Delilah
Alone in my cell again, I used the restroom and brushed my teeth, but I didn’t taste the toothpaste or feel the bristles.
Pregnant.
The enormity of that idea was so overwhelming that at first, I couldn’t think past it. A lifetime ago, I’d thought I might want kids someday. Back when I’d had a normal life and inalienable rights. When the best thing about my boyfriend’s compulsive stability was what a great dad he’d be.
But now?
I didn’t have a boyfriend. I hadn’t had sex since the day I was sold into the menagerie.
Except obviously I was wrong about that.
Tears filled my eyes, so I closed them. I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming as images flickered behind my eyelids.
Hands reaching for Zyanya’s straps. The private room hidden by drapes. The party host handing his credit card to the guard.
Was that how it had happened? Was I rented for a night? An hour?
Did I fight?
My stomach heaved, and I lurched for the toilet. My dinner came back up and I flushed it away, but the nausea remained.
I lay down on the floor and pressed my burning face to the cool concrete, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Who was he? Was it just once, or was I missing multiple memories of abuse?
Somehow, not knowing made it worse.
Could it be a guard? It would have to be one the furiae had never seen abuse anyone, or touching me would have had serious consequences for him. But the Spectacle had plenty of guards who didn’t actively mistreat their charges.
Magnolia said the handlers couldn’t touch us without paying the rental fee. Had one paid for me? Had I seen him today?
Did I walk right past him without knowing what he’d done to me?
My skin crawled with the possibility.
Someone had touched me. Someone had been inside me, in some brutal moment I’d had no control over. I couldn’t remember it, yet I couldn’t stop picturing it, and suddenly my body itself seemed to be my biggest adversary.
My brain was withholding the truth. My womb was harboring an uninvited stranger. And the furiae...
She who could avenge any wrong had put me in the path of danger, then refused to defend me. Or to avenge me.
Or even tell me whose face had been stricken from my memory.
Maybe he was a stranger I’d never see again. But he could be someone I saw every day. Someone I talked to and worked with. Someone who had absolute power over my living conditions and my meals and my body.
And maybe over my mind.
There must be a reason I couldn’t remember.
I forced myself off the floor and curled up on my stack of sleep mats, where I stared at the concrete wall inches from my face.
Obviously, the fact that I was pregnant meant that whoever he was, he’d taken no precautions. What if I’d caught something?
A fresh wave of nausea rolled over me with that thought. I needed to see a doctor.
Maybe the doctor could tell me about the...fetus. Was it human? Could it be born a furiae?
Questions tumbled through my head too fast for me to focus on, but ultimately, none of the answers about what would happen to a child born in captivity—even if it were human—mattered.
They wouldn’t let me have a baby.
When Tabitha Vandekamp found out, she would do to me what she’d done to Magnolia. I would have no more say in the fate of my unborn child than I’d had in its conception.
She must not know yet, or that would already have happened.
How far along was I? If I’d lost another month’s memories, Tabitha Vandekamp could have ended the pregnancy, and I might never even have known about it.
Could that still happen? Could I wake up tomorrow missing another two months and never remember that I was pregnant?
Does the baby have to do with my missing memories? Why bother to erase the conception, if they didn’t know about the pregnancy? Why bother at all? They didn’t do that for Magnolia.
After trying to untangle a knot of possibilities that led nowhere, I felt like I somehow knew even less than I’d started with.
What I did know was that to buy time to think it through, I’d have to hide my pregnancy for as long as possible.
I could not go see a doctor, even to test for communicable diseases.
Disgusted, terrified and exhausted beyond measure, I closed my eyes. Then noticed that though it must have been well past midnight, the light was still on. How was I supposed to sleep with—
Footsteps echoed down the hall, then stopped on the other side of my door.
“Who’s there?” I called.
A tray slid through the slot at the bottom of the door. It held half a red apple and about an ounce of cubed cheddar.
“Hey!” I crossed the small space to stand as close to the door as I dared. “Who’s out there?”
But the window only showed an empty hallway, and I could already hear footsteps receding toward the door at the end. As I knelt to pick up the tray, the overhead light dimmed to a level that would be comfortable to sleep in, yet still let me see the food in front of me.
I sank onto the stack of thin mattresses with the tray in my lap, and at first I could only stare at the food. Apple and cheese. A perfectly healthy snack, which was an extravagance in a facility that labeled itself “savage.” I’d never been given a snack by the Spectacle staff—not that I could remember anyway. Neither had anyone else, that I knew of. So why...?
Because I’d lost my dinner.
The answer hit me with the emotional force of a sledgehammer swung right at my soul. A private cell. Exercise and sunlight. Vitamins. Late-night snacks.
Someone knew about the baby. Someone with the authority to give me healthy privileges and protect both me and my unborn child from Tabitha Vandekamp and her infanticidal tendencies.
I could think of only one person who fit that bill, and who could have arranged to make me forget eight weeks of my life.
Willem Vandekamp knew about the baby.
And wanted it to live.