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One
Ruby
“Your father is dead.”
Cold. I don’t even feel shocked, and I can’t muster another tear. Not for anything. Not even for him.
Daddy.
After the last month—has it been a month?—there is no clock or calendar in my underground, windowless room.
This is the first time I’ve been brought up in, I don’t know, weeks, maybe? Since he first took me down the stairs, to the dungeon where I remained. After I destroyed the pretty prison, I’d known before the dungeon, that is. The room draped in cream and splashed in red. Like my hair. Like the gems of my namesake. Like blood.
Before being brought to the cool, dank, dark space below the house, I hadn’t even fathomed that dungeons were still a thing. A real thing. And that people still kept other people in them.
“Your father is dead.”
Daddy…
My heart finds the strength to throb. It hurts.
I’d followed the suited lackey up the stairs that started as cool, damp concrete, transitioning to raw wood, and then gleaming hardwood. The bone-deep cold that settled after my first few nights in the dungeon throbbed in my marrow with every step, relentless.
Now, my bare toes curl in the plush carpet of the monster’s cavernous office. Heat radiates from the flames that dance in the fireplace. I fight the urge to shiver under the flame I desperately want to scoot closer to, to soak up the delicious warmth the fire offers. Such a tease.
I’m so cold.
The monster watches me closely from where he sits behind his desk. The thing is a sprawling beast of gleaming dark wood. The painfully handsome man behind it is even more beastly than the black dog who stands sentry at his side.
“The Devil was beautiful, Ruby. Beware a beautiful man.” Mama’s words echo in my mind, and another stab of grief sinks its needle into the abused pincushion of my heart.
First Mama, now Daddy.
Does it really matter what happens to me now that they’re gone?
“Ruby?” the large man with the dark hair and darker eyes calls my name. In the beginning, I would flinch. But he’s visited me most every day. I think it’s every day. He opens the cage of my barren cellar and sits in the single chair that squats in the corner of my cell, opposite my narrow bed. In the beginning, he interrogated me—always about my father and my life on the outskirts of the small town of Madison, Georgia.
The interrogations stopped, but the visits continued. Sometimes he talked. Sometimes he simply watched me with those dark eyes.
I never talked back.
I have nothing to say to him.
I tried in the beginning, with my own questions. They were never answered.
I still don’t know why I’m here.
“Ruby?” he calls again, sharper this time. My eyes lift from the large fist of his linked hands where they rest on the surface of his gleaming desk, to his eyes. My heart skips. They’re so dark. Bottomless. “Are you listening to me?”
I blink. He sighs, a weary thing.
Pushing back from his desk, he moves to close the space between us. His massive dog stands but doesn’t move to follow. Breath gets caught in my throat as I prepare for a physical attack of some sort. Even though he’s never hurt me.
There’s a first time for everything.
He stands so close to me; I smell that same scent of musky maleness and rich cedar tinged with the spice of flame that lingers in my cell long after his every visit.
His big hands come to land on either side of my face. My lips part. My body trembles.
