Page 16 of Torment

The bars slid open, allowing him entry. My legs trembled as he knelt down before me, slowly pulling out a glinting knife from his jacket pocket.

I shook my head wildly. “Please, no! Don’t!”

He held the knife in the air, around six inches from my face. Other than that, he didn’t make a move. He simply stayed in that exact position for several minutes, probably just to torment me; make me wait on tenterhooks until the second finally came when he decided to slash the knife over my delicate skin. Or plunge it into my chest.

I choked back a sob, wishing I could see his face. Especially his eyes, just so I could see if there was any shred of humanity in the man at all. But everything was covered up. The mask had a sort of dark mesh over the eyeholes, so I couldn’t even tell what color his irises were, let alone if his gaze contained any sort of human emotion.

I thought back to what I saw earlier, when he was only wearing the balaclava. His eyes looked dark. Brown, maybe hazel. It was hard to remember because I’d been so spaced-out on the drugs.

Finally, mercifully, the knife dropped. The man used it to slice away the tight rope around my wrists, and less than a minute later, I was free. I didn’t move from the chair, however. I was too frightened, and given how little I knew about my captor, I thought it would be best if I waited for him to tell me what to do. I didn’t want to provoke him in any sort of way.

He brought the dog bowl over and placed it on the floor before me.

“Eat,” he said. His deep voice was muffled behind the mask.

“So you can speak,” I murmured under my breath before I could stop myself.

The man slapped me across the face, hard. I recoiled and almost fell off the chair from the impact. With my cheek smarting, I moved down to the floor and sat cross-legged by the bowl, wondering how I was supposed to eat the soup without a spoon.

I realized how when my captor kicked me in the back, forcing me to double over as I whimpered from the pain. He expected me to eat from the bowl like an actual dog. Clearly, he was trying to humiliate me, and it was working.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. My cheeks felt even more feverish now.

“Eat,” he repeated.

He grabbed my head and forced it downward so that my face was hovering right over the bowl. “Please, no,” I said in a ragged voice. “I’m really not hungry.”

The man sighed and stood up. He crossed over to the area which was normally behind bars. After picking up the black bag he brought in earlier, he came back over to me and opened it, displaying its contents. There was a bottle of liquid nutritional supplements, a large plastic thing that vaguely resembled an IV solution bag, and a roll of plastic medical tubing. The message was clear. If I didn’t eat on my own, he would force-feed me.

I suppose there was some sort of positive message to be taken from this. If he wanted me to eat, then that meant he wanted me alive. If he intended on killing me right away, he wouldn’t bother. That meant I had a few days left at the very least, if not more.

A chill ran through me as I realized that might not be such a good thing after all. A quick death would be preferable to days or weeks of rape and torture, if that was what he intended to do with me. And honestly, what the hell else would a crazed kidnapper want to do with a new captive? Of course he was going to hurt me terribly.

I leaned down and began to slurp the soup as fast as possible, hating the thought of this psychopath smirking behind his mask as he forced me to eat like an animal.

When I was done, he dragged me to my feet and placed me back in the chair. Then he grabbed some white rope out of a zipped pocket in the black bag and tied my wrists back down to the wooden arms. I didn’t try to fight. He’d already made it clear he had no issues slapping and kicking me if I did anything to bother him.

After leaving my cell and returning yet again, the man brought over a large gray container. He opened it on my right, and I glanced down with horror to see a scalpel, some sort of black chip, and a spool of thread with an accompanying needle. Next to that was a packet of tissues and several wound dressings.

“What are you going to do to me?” I asked, my voice trembling.

Once again, the man was silent.

He picked up the scalpel and moved behind me, pushing my shoulders forward as far as I could move with my wrists restrained. The sharp metal dragged down my back, not hard enough to cut or hurt me, but hard enough for me to register that it was happening.

The scalpel drifted over my shoulder toward my collarbone, carefully and meticulously, waking every nerve ending in its path. Then it moved back in the direction it came, sliding over my shoulder blades. I stayed stock still, terrified that I’d inadvertently cause the man to slip and cut open part of my spine if I budged one inch.

When the scalpel was just below my left shoulder blade, my captor sliced into me without any warning. Sharp pain lanced through me and colorful spots flashed in front of my eyes as I screamed, but he didn’t stop. The scalpel kept moving slowly across, sinking deeper and deeper, carving out a large slit in my back.

“Stop!” I shrieked. “Please!”

“Shh, Jolie,” he muttered.

The name trickled through the recesses of my mind like cool water. In its wake, my brain began working overtime, forging connections. Whoever this insane man was, he knew my real name. That meant it had to be someone I knew from before 2013, seeing as that was when I first started introducing myself to people as Jo.

My mind whirled as I recalled the theories some of the other New Eden girls had about the men of the cult surviving and hiding out somewhere. It really didn’t seem possible, but at the same time, it was the only thing that made sense to me right now. I guess the men could be alive somehow, at least a few of them, and they wanted us back. All the women and children.

That had to be why I was taken like this.

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