Page 32 of Heartless Prince

9

Tatum

The days drifted by endlessly.Or maybe it was weeks. I had no way of knowing, and I’d lost track of time what felt like an eternity ago. There were no clocks or calendars in the room I was trapped in, no pens or sharp implements to scratch marks on the walls in an attempt to keep track.

The only certainty in this place was that I would always be confused, always scared, my mind a constant tangle of chaotic, muddy disorder. The air in here felt dense, suffocating, and I could barely sleep, even when I wanted to.

The lights were almost always on. Glaring, bright, a steady reminder that I was still in this hellhole. The only comfort was that every so often they would suddenly turn off for a few hours, plunging me into pitch-black darkness.

I used to be scared of the dark when I was a kid, and in more recent years I still felt the need to cover every inch of myself in bed at night, always afraid to have an arm or leg dangling into the night air beside my bed. Now, contrary to all that, the darkness was my only solace. It was like a place out of time, a place to rest without addressing reality. A sanctuary.

When I couldn’t see anything around me, I could easily pretend I was somewhere else, try to forget where I really was until the lights went back on, cruelly dragging me back to the real world where I was still a prisoner. The real world, where I couldn’t rest. Couldn’t do anything at all other than sit in the bright light and think about my old life and where it all went wrong.

I missed my friends. I missed our late-night trips down to the Buttery for fries and hot lobster rolls. I missed my classes. I even missed the grueling hours of study and exam prep. Would I ever experience any of that again?

No,a sinister, insidious little voice told me. You heard Tobias. You belong here now.

I kept rewinding my actions over the last few months, trying to delve deep into my memories and figure out the exact moment I messed up and caused all this trouble for myself. I previously thought it was my decision to write a paper on Crown and Dagger that got me caught in this dark-woven net, but Tobias had made it very clear the other day that the society was already aware of me a long time before then, and they always intended to take me at some point.

But why? What did I do to make them choose me? Was there something in particular about me that screamed ‘kidnap me’? Was there something about my face, my body, my eyes?

I knew it didn’t actually do me any good to blame myself for the actions of these sadistic men. Kidnapping girls was a fucked up thing to do, and the logical side of my mind—what was left of it, anyway—told me I wasn’t really responsible for what happened to me. And yet, I couldn’t stop the crushing sense of culpability from hitting me over and over again. There must be something I did, some tiny little thing that made them pick me.

I even wondered in a foggy haze if I’d actually done something to make them think I was for sale. I knew how stupid that sounded, but after days and days of endless boredom and fear, my rationality was starting to slip. Things were suddenly fitting into place in my brain with little clicks; things that never fitted before. Yes, maybe I did do something to make these men think I wanted to be sold. Maybe I told my parents to do it. Maybe I thought it would help with their situation, and I owed it to them for taking care of me all my life, even though they could barely afford it. Maybe I somehow forgot it all but was still ultimately responsible.

I pinched my left arm. “No. I didn’t do this,” I whispered to myself, trying to stop the irrational thoughts from plaguing me. I turned on myself again only seconds later. “Or maybe I did….”

The words left me hollow, like my chest was caving in on itself.

I still had no idea what the men of Crown and Dagger actually wanted to do with me now that I was their captive. The contraceptive shot I was given by the nurse and the way Tobias told me I was going to be the perfect toy for Elias made me think I would be raped, turned into some sort of sex slave. The word ‘toy’ made that abundantly clear. I might be a virgin, but I wasn’t that innocent. I’d read dark, sexy books before. I’d watched porn movies. I knew the sorts of things some men liked to do to women. The sorts of things some women liked men to do to them.

But they hadn’t touched me. At least not yet.

The closest thing I had to human contact was the slot opening every so often on the door with seemingly-disembodied hands shoving food and water through for me seconds later. Aside from that, there was nothing. No one visited me, spoke to me, or touched me in any way. No one gave me anything to do. I just sat here in the same clothes every day, bathed in my own sweat, getting dirtier with each hour that passed.

Without my usual routine, and without any word on what was going to happen to me in the future, there was nothing to keep me stable; nothing for me to cling to just to maintain my sanity. My thoughts had turned wild, winding and rambling through unmapped space, tethered to nothing. Anything could happen. Everything. I could be dead tomorrow, or I could be alive yet wishing I was dead.

It was like living in a wild snowstorm. I couldn’t see what was ahead of me, couldn’t hear anything but the howling roar of abject terror in the back of my mind. I had no idea where I was or where I would be going anytime soon, and the fear kept coming and coming and coming from every direction, making my body ache.

If they would just tell me what they had in store for me, that would calm me down a little bit, even if what they had in store for me was death, because at least I’d finally know. At least I could mentally prepare for it. But instead, I was cruelly left in the dark, never told anything at all. Never able to prepare for whatever came next. Things would inevitably be sprung on me out of the blue.

If anything ever happened at all, that is. Right now, it seemed as if I’d been left here to rot. As if I was being punished, trapped in solitary confinement like a criminal.

The thoughts of the constant isolation and abandonment made my mind drift to my friend Greer. A few days ago, a vague suspicion had taken root in my mind when I remembered an article she sent me when I first decided to write about secret societies for my class paper. Greer had always been into conspiracy theories, and even though she thought Crown and Dagger was essentially a glorified frat, she’d once read some things about other secret societies that she thought I might find interesting.

At the time, I thought it was a load of crap, but now I wondered if there was some merit to it after all.

The article she sent me was about a now-defunct CIA program called MK-Ultra which operated between 1953 and 1973. Their mission was to develop mind control drugs and techniques. They experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, sexual abuse and other forms of torture. Many unwilling civilian and military subjects were used in testing, and the program was eventually shut down after all the controversy.

One of the alleged experiments was for the development of ‘beta slaves’—sex slaves who were programmed using mind control techniques and trained to ignore any inhibitions in order to serve a master (or many masters) in sexual ways. The ‘programming’ involved mental and physical torture, making them swap pain for pleasure deep in their minds. This torture they endured during training was supposed to destroy something called ‘the sacred feminine’ in order to turn them into nothing more than a piece of meat to be used and abused by the master at any given time.

According to the article Greer sent me, certain secret societies and criminal organizations had supposedly used these ‘beta slave’ training techniques to create willing sex slaves to serve them.

Perhaps that was what Crown and Dagger did to women. Perhaps that was exactly what was happening to me right now. I could be in the very first stage of the programming process, where the men in charge would attempt to mentally break a woman via imprisonment and isolation.

The sick thing was, if that were the case, then it was actually working on me, as much as I hated to admit it. I’d been so neglected and deprived in these last couple of weeks that I actually wanted someone in this godforsaken hellhole to come in and touch me, just so I could feel the warmth and connection of a hand that wasn’t mine. Even if the hand in question was delivering a cold-water slap to my face. I just wanted to feel something, anything.

I was losing my mind.

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