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“Oh.” Mara purrs low. “The dog’s finally sitting to attention.” Holding a bloody scalpel aloft, Mara watches me. “Maybe I’m done talking. It’s hard to work with a distraction.”
“Work?” I scoff, pulling lightly at the heavy manacles holding me down. “This is work?”
“More of a hobby. Some people paint, others work with clay. I prefer to study how many pieces I can cut out of you before you lose all speech comprehension.”
Her blade saws into me, and I grit my teeth, trying to ignore how it feels like she’s scraping right along my very core.
“Alena was who I was talking about.”
Wait… I remember.
Mara turned up today in a rage, utterly furious at something, and I was her stress relief. I didn’t care. I just had to survive—survive until something broke.
“Your cool Façade is so easy to break,” I remark breathlessly. “What did she do? Use the wrong teaspoon?”
“Worse,” Mara rages on. “She tried to escape, the rotten little bitch.”
My heart skips a beat.
“Claimed there was something wrong with my baby, played so sick that I nearly carted her off to the hospital. Until I realized she was drinking soap to make herself sick and the blood was her own doing. It was clever, sure?—”
That’s my girl.
Flesh shucks, wet and sickening, and my stomach rolls painfully.
“But consuming those chemicals? Endangering my child? She was lucky I didn’t cut it out of her right there and then. I’d leave her to die in the nursery, so the last thing she sees is everything she’s losing.”
That thought alone, spat from the lips of my torturer, ignites an unexpected flame in my chest. I can’t pinpoint why, considering the threat to Alena has always been great. Maybe I’m at the end of my very thin tether.
The last straw, as it were.
Mara continues on, detailing all the cruel ways she wants to torture Alena with our baby, and the anger in me grows like embers taking their first breath.
I laugh, and Mara pauses.
“What?” she demands. “Have you finally cracked?”
“No.” I chuckle, and my throat burns. “I just realized something.”
“What?”
“That I’m going to actually kill you.”
She lifts her head, and when our gazes meet, I pour every ounce of hatred into the look as I can.
“Alena managing to get one over on you? You’re not as slick as you think, but please. Keep telling me all the ways you’re going to hurt her because I’m storing them. And when I’m free and out of here, I will do every single one of those to you. I know how to make it slow, how to drag out death. And then?”
I surge up with as much strength as I can muster, and my wrists complain as the metal edges slice into my skin.
“Then, I swear I will skin you alive for endangering my family and harming Alena. You’ll be begging me,” I spit with a dry mouth. “Begging me for forgiveness, and I will remind you of this moment.”
Her eye twitches and her lips part, but no words come.
Is it dangerous to taunt her? Maybe.
On one hand, she might just kill me, but if she does, I will make sure to leave some kind of mark, so Alena will know. And if she doesn’t kill me, then it’s just another day of making sure I survive.
Unfortunately, Mara’s reaction is a middle ground.
