little food, multiple wounds, and an increasingly blood-thirsty captor, my body can’t quite seem to catch up and replenish itself.
I wonder how much more blood I can lose before I’ll die.
I wonder how long it will be before I want to die.
Mostly, I wonder which one will come first.
PART ONE
Purgatory
CHAPTER ONE
AVERY
“I’m not going to hurt her,” the man in the mask says to Rome Montague, handing him a large butcher’s knife. “You are.”
“The fuck I am,” Rome replies, his words thick with fury and venom. With the desire to keep me safe. But his hand closes around the knife handle anyway. I already know what he will try to do.
But there’s a reason you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
A blade can’t beat a bullet.
And just as Rome raises the knife to attack our gun-toting captor, a searing jolt cracks at the base of my throat, and I immediately fall to the floor. I scream as the collar around my neck delivers a measured current of electricity via two tiny metal prongs, straight into my skin. It travels through my body, hot and loud, a burn with no flame. On my back, I struggle to keep my eyes open, blinking furiously, as I watch the rest of this horror show unfold above me.
Rome stops moving, the knife’s blade midair, as the guy in the mask slowly shakes his head. The message is clear: If Rome tries to hurt our captor, he’ll deliver another punishing electric shock to me via the collar around my throat.
I want to be brave. I want to tell Rome to attack him anyway. That even if the shocks never stop coming, that even if I die, he should fight his way out of this hellhole with every ounce of energy he has. But I’m still gripped by the current that pulses through my body, as if somebody has injected acid into my veins, the white-hot agony unrelenting. And I’m not that brave. I’m not brave at all.
Rome drops the knife to the floor, putting his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Stop. Stop! I dropped the knife, man, fucking stop whatever you’re doing to her!”
The man in the mask delivers one more jarring jolt of electricity to me before he stops. I have a feeling he doesn’t like being told what to do.
“Pick up the knife,” the masked man says, his voice heavily distorted by what I can only guess is a voice-changing device of some kind fitted under his mask. He sounds like the murderer from the movie Scream. And, right now, I might as well be the fucking Drew Barrymore character, about to be disemboweled.
Rome haltingly picks up the knife, just as our captor produces a rolled-up newspaper from somewhere inside his layers of black clothing and tosses it in my direction.
“Her blood. On the newspaper. Or I shock her until she pisses herself.”
Rome picks up the newspaper, his face contorted with confusion, with worry. “Why?”
I brace myself for another shock, but it doesn’t come. Instead, our captor backs toward the door, his gun still trained on Rome. “Proof of life,” he says, opening the door and stepping out of the room. Seconds later, I hear heavy locks being bolted outside the door, making it impossible for us to escape.
Rome drops the knife and newspaper at his feet. He throws himself at the door, pounding his fists against it. He pounds and pounds, until blood blooms fresh along his knuckles.
Too bad it’s not his blood we need.
“Rome,” I croak, my voice weak from the shock-collar’s relentless assault. He turns slowly, letting his fists drop to his sides. When he looks at me, he flinches. There’s something dark in his eyes. Longing. Loss. A mournfulness, as if we’re already dead.
Maybe it would be easier that way. Today, though, I’m still surviving on threads of hope. Maybe we’ll get out. Maybe this will all be a terrible nightmare one day, and we’ll finally be free of this room and its horrors.
Physically, anyway. Instinctively, I know that, even if our bodies make it out of this place, a part of us is always going to be down here together in the dark.
I struggle to sit up, my body complaining loudly as I manage to raise myself onto my elbows, my legs stretched out in front of me. I feel lucky that the electric shock didn’t make me pee all over myself. It seems, even down here, even after everything, I still have a tiny shred