Page 69 of Bears Not Included

A woman I know and love...

Faith.

She’s wearing her favorite dress in her favorite color, blue, except it’s speckled with blood… hers. Her face is swollen, and her lips are busted and bleeding.

Oh god. Faith.

I swallow down the urge to vomit, but when Yenin slaps her so hard across her face that she falls off the chair. I bend over, clutching my stomach, as everything inside me turns upside down.

Callen moves to turn it off and I scream at him to leave it.

The camera moves with Yenin, capturing everything, and I watch in complete horror at what he does to her.

Laying on her side, he kicks her face with his boot, and I hear her faint gurgling sound as blood fills her mouth. He takes a handful of her hair, pulls her up to her knees, bends over, and punches her in the stomach. The sound she makes will haunt me until the day I die.

Tears roll down my face but I don’t even allow myself to blink. I can’t stop watching this. I’m not allowed the luxury of not seeing what he was doing to Faith.

And so I continue. My eyes taking in every brutal slap, punch, and booted kick. I listen for any sound Faith makes because I have to etch it into my brain. I can’t forget anything about this. But it’s Yenin’s laugh that shatters through me when he lets go of her hair and Faith topples over like a bloody rag doll.

I don’t close my eyes when Yenin undoes his pants, when he pulls out his penis, and does the most degrading thing to Faith. I don’t close my eyes. I just swallow the vomit that rises up inside me. I just remember the shame in Faith’s one eye, the one she can still see through that isn’t swollen shut from being repeatedly hit.

But I can’t contain the sob that fights past my resolve as I stand and watch what Yenin does to Faith.

“Livia,” Deacon says. “That’s enough.”

“No,” I say firmly. “It’s not. It’ll never be enough.”

I remained fixated on the screen in front of me. My insides turn to ash when Yenin takes a pair of scissors and haphazardly cuts off her dress, nicking her skin purposefully. He cuts off her bra and panties and when she’s naked, he looks directly into the camera. And then he takes the scissors, pulls at the short, trimmed hair on her mound, and proceeds to cut through the strands.

“This is for you, Livia,” Kirill Yenin says as he blows away the pubic hairs from his hand. “This is what I always intended to do to you on our honeymoon and every night after. This is for you. Watch closely. Your cunt is going to get nice and wet when you see what I was going to do to you.”

He removes his gun from the back of his pants, and...

I’m shaking so much that it feels as if I’m losing my eyesight. This time, Deacon comes to me, and I move out of his reach.

“Don’t you dare touch me,” I say, and the ice in my voice is the same that’s running in my veins, and it clogs my heart.

He flings her onto a stained wooden table and then brutally penetrates her with his gun. This time, he draws a mournful cry from Faith, and he enjoys it. The camera zooms around the room. There is a group of men standing around and watching, laughing when she cries.

While Yenin repeatedly shoves the gun into her, another man comes onto the screen and hands him a cane and a dildo. Yenin forces the dildo into her mouth until she chokes and this creates another round of raucous laughter.

“This is all for you, Livia Daniels.” Yenin’s shrill voice echoes around the room. He then flips her over onto her stomach on the table as if she were a slab of meat and not a human being.

The front of my dress is soaked with tears. I’m so ice cold, I can’t move. But it’s not enough. I can’t look away now. I need to see it and feel what Faith is feeling.

Yenin canes her. From her shoulder blades down to her feet. Faith is not even moving away.

She’s not moving.

She’s not moving.

She’s not moving.

And then Yenin takes the cane and inserts it into her anus, shoving it in so roughly that I can hear her body beat against the wood of the table.

And still, she doesn’t move.

Faith doesn’t move.

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