Prologue
I could hear the horses above me in their stalls clicking their hooves and occasionally neighing. I could hear the sound of Scout, the family dog, running back and forth excitedly as he followed the heavy, booted footsteps that went from stall to stall. I felt the familiar tremble start to go through my body as the footsteps got closer and closer to the hidden floor latch that kept me hidden from the world. But like last time I was worried because I couldn’t distinguish between fear and need anymore. I couldn’t understand why my body reacted the way it did lately whenever he came down into this dark, dusty prison and I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand it. I just wanted whatever it was that he would do to me to last longer than the time before. It was almost like I had been reconditioned to want him which made me wonder if I was as weak as he had lead me to believe I was before this started.
The dirt wall in front of me was taunting. It held a riddle that I had scratched into each day when I was rewarded with a new clue. I just had to rearrange the question properly and answer it and then my hell would be over. But what do you do when you've become so used to what I've been going through? You put it off; you push away the answer to the riddle and you wonder if you really want to be let go. It had been about seven years that I had been kept in this room and I just didn't know how much the world had changed outside. Did anyone still love me? Did any of them still wonder about me or was I just a distant memory to them, faded away like the markings on this wall?
After being passed around like a used toy over and over, constantly to someone new on each year around the same time, I was always afraid and still eager to see who I would be passed to next. In my mind, it was a twisted game where if I wanted to survive, I had to keep playing and hope that the end of the game would come for me soon. I wanted to be "out of lives" or at least be the hero who gets to live on even though the world collapsed around her.
Of course, I was completely shocked when I was given back to the first one that had taken me when I was just seventeen years old. I remember letting out a nervous laughter with a pinch of hysteria behind it, because I wasn't sure why he had come back for me. I only hoped that I wouldn't be traded again, because even though he was the first one to do this to me and send me off, he was also the only one who had earned my trust in some weird way.
Everything was different this time around though. Completely different.
See, there are things that should never happen and this is one of them.
I wanted out.
With as much as my body wouldn’t admit it, my brain knew better. It knew that what I was going through was going to kill me or drive me insane. It knew that I was stronger than he thought I was because when alone, I would constantly look for a way out. I closed my eyes and listened intently. He was three stalls away from the door which meant I had at least another twenty or so minutes before he came down; if he decided to come down.
I went over to the stairs and walked up using my hands to help me determine when the gap got smaller and I was closer to the door. I sat down on the third to top step and wondered how I was going to block it so that I could at least get a day’s rest. Lately it had become a daily thing with him and it was more brutal each time. I still had the bruises on my arm from yesterday when he had decided it would be a good idea to tie them with rope and suspend me a foot off the ground while he worked on me.
The riddle would have to wait. I wouldn’t have enough time to figure it out now that he was so close to the door and so close to coming down and “spending time” with me, as he liked to call it.
I started to tremble again when I heard his heavy booted footsteps approaching the small trap door. Almost as if he knew I was waiting for him. Almost if he knew that in some twisted
I could hear the horses above me in their stalls clicking their hooves and occasionally neighing. I could hear the sound of Scout, the family dog, running back and forth excitedly as he followed the heavy, booted footsteps that went from stall to stall. I felt the familiar tremble start to go through my body as the footsteps got closer and closer to the hidden floor latch that kept me hidden from the world. But like last time I was worried because I couldn’t distinguish between fear and need anymore. I couldn’t understand why my body reacted the way it did lately whenever he came down into this dark, dusty prison and I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand it. I just wanted whatever it was that he would do to me to last longer than the time before. It was almost like I had been reconditioned to want him which made me wonder if I was as weak as he had lead me to believe I was before this started.
The dirt wall in front of me was taunting. It held a riddle that I had scratched into each day when I was rewarded with a new clue. I just had to rearrange the question properly and answer it and then my hell would be over. But what do you do when you've become so used to what I've been going through? You put it off; you push away the answer to the riddle and you wonder if you really want to be let go. It had been about seven years that I had been kept in this room and I just didn't know how much the world had changed outside. Did anyone still love me? Did any of them still wonder about me or was I just a distant memory to them, faded away like the markings on this wall?
After being passed around like a used toy over and over, constantly to someone new on each year around the same time, I was always afraid and still eager to see who I would be passed to next. In my mind, it was a twisted game where if I wanted to survive, I had to keep playing and hope that the end of the game would come for me soon. I wanted to be "out of lives" or at least be the hero who gets to live on even though the world collapsed around her.
Of course, I was completely shocked when I was given back to the first one that had taken me when I was just seventeen years old. I remember letting out a nervous laughter with a pinch of hysteria behind it, because I wasn't sure why he had come back for me. I only hoped that I wouldn't be traded again, because even though he was the first one to do this to me and send me off, he was also the only one who had earned my trust in some weird way.
Everything was different this time around though. Completely different.
See, there are things that should never happen and this is one of them.
I wanted out.
With as much as my body wouldn’t admit it, my brain knew better. It knew that what I was going through was going to kill me or drive me insane. It knew that I was stronger than he thought I was because when alone, I would constantly look for a way out. I closed my eyes and listened intently. He was three stalls away from the door which meant I had at least another twenty or so minutes before he came down; if he decided to come down.
I went over to the stairs and walked up using my hands to help me determine when the gap got smaller and I was closer to the door. I sat down on the third to top step and wondered how I was going to block it so that I could at least get a day’s rest. Lately it had become a daily thing with him and it was more brutal each time. I still had the bruises on my arm from yesterday when he had decided it would be a good idea to tie them with rope and suspend me a foot off the ground while he worked on me.
The riddle would have to wait. I wouldn’t have enough time to figure it out now that he was so close to the door and so close to coming down and “spending time” with me, as he liked to call it.
I started to tremble again when I heard his heavy booted footsteps approaching the small trap door. Almost as if he knew I was waiting for him. Almost if he knew that in some twisted
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