Page 42 of Toy

9

Jolie

I awoke with a jolt,panic flooding my veins. I was surrounded by darkness.

Black, stifling darkness.

I tried to lift my hands to rub my aching forehead, but they stopped short. My eyes widened with alarm and dread built in the pit of my stomach. Where the hell was I? How did I get here? Why couldn’t I move properly?

A foggy memory popped into my mind. I knew what was happening now. I was at New Eden 2.0, and one of the cult men had affixed my wrists and ankles to chains on a wall. There was a heavy chain collar around my neck too, preventing me from raising my head properly.

Blood pounded in my ears as the memories continued to seep back.

After taking me to some seedy-looking men across the border in Alabama to have a fake passport created for me, Danny kept me in his rented limo and a series of hotel rooms for several days as we made our way to New York. It felt like it took a week, but it was probably less—he had me drugged to the eyeballs most of the time, so one day would seem to drag on for four as I repeatedly drifted in and out of consciousness.

I was still drugged when he took me to the airport, too. I had a hazy memory of him telling me that the men who made my fake passport were mafia guys, friends of my father, and that if I didn’t behave myself and keep my head down at all times, they would find Mason and kill him.

I didn’t doubt that. Tom Anderson had made it very clear to Mason and me that my father genuinely had those sort of connections. He’d once hired some mafia men to kill Mason’s family, and they’d done it like it was nothing. Horribly so.

Because of that threat, I did what I was told. I walked through the airport like a dazed zombie, plodding after Danny, and when I handed my passport and ticket over to the friendly woman at the boarding gate, I smiled and nodded when she told me to enjoy my honeymoon.

My memories grew hazy at that point, mired in thick, sticky confusion.

I wasn’t sure where we flew or how long it took to get there. I had the vaguest recollection of the boarding gate attendant saying that the location was beautiful, and it was also written right on my ticket, but I couldn’t remember any of it properly. Danny took the ticket from me once we boarded the plane anyway, along with the passport.

I recalled noisy traffic and colorful street vendors when we left the airport on the other end, and I also remembered noticing that the air was balmy, but that didn’t help me much. Based on those nebulous little factoids, we could be in South America, Africa or Asia. Hell, we could even be in certain parts of Australia or Europe. The only continents I could fully rule out were North America (seeing as the cult clearly wanted me out of that part of the world) and Antarctica.

Not exactly useful information.

At some point after we left the airport, Danny bundled me into yet another car, stuck a dark sack over my head, and drove me to another location. It seemed remote, given how quiet the air was aside from the whir of helicopter blades, but that didn’t bring me any closer to figuring out where we were either.

I was put on the helicopter and injected with another dose of sedatives. When I woke up again, we’d landed somewhere, and two familiar cult men were dragging me across a large field with damp green grass that went past my knees. They’d removed the sack from my head, and despite the way my vision was swimming from the drugs, I was able to catch several glimpses of my new surroundings.

In the flat field, there were approximately twenty small houses elevated on stilts. There were also a few cabins that stood flat on the ground on one side. The buildings were all made from a mixture of brown wood and cream brick, and they were arranged around an enormous paved square. On one edge of that central square was a stony circular spot with a tall wooden pillar erected in the middle of it.

About a hundred yards up a path leading away from the square, a familiar-looking mansion stood. It was white with large pillars and a balcony running along the edges, and the doors had ornately-carved arches over them.

The palatial building looked almost exactly like the mansion back at New Eden Ranch in Louisiana. For one stunned and confused moment, I thought I was actually there, but the rest of the view contradicted that.

Beyond the large field which contained the buildings, there was nothing but thick jungle and steep mountains. Dense undergrowth and trees as tall as towers surrounded what I now realized was a deep valley, and the air was alive with the raucous screeches of exotic birds. A few times, I even caught a flickering glance of monkeys swinging through the nearby branches.

This definitely wasn’t New Eden. At least not the one I once knew.

The men dragged me into one of the flat cabins and pushed me inside a room so small it could only be described as a broom cupboard. That was where I sat now, restrained by the chains and cuffs.

Since my arrival, I’d tried to keep myself calm and talk myself into retaining some form of sanity, but it wasn’t easy. My head constantly throbbed with pain, along with the rest of my bruised body, and the tiny space I’d been shoved into hurt my mind as well. Claustrophobia had been an issue for me for many years, and I was sure the cultists knew that. Right now, it was sending me into yet another spinning panic, making my breath come in short, sharp wheezes.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture an open meadow. Sunlight, grass, flowers, fresh air. I wanted so badly to see all of those things, even if they were just imaginary pictures in my head, but the images wouldn’t come.

With a sigh, I opened my eyes again. It was useless. No matter how hard I tried, I remained painfully aware that I was still confined in this minuscule space.

I had no idea how much time had passed since the men brought me here. There were no clocks, no windows, no sunlight. Sometimes a dim overhead light would switch on in the room outside the suffocating cupboard they kept me chained in, but that was no help or comfort. It only meant one or more of the cultists had arrived to torment me for a while.

My skin was alive with the marks they’d left on me so far, and every painful shift of my body reminded me of another way they’d chosen to torture me. Fists. Whips. Belts. Batons. Electricity. Razor blades. Hallucinogenic drugs.

Each man was more brutal than the last. Each torture more excruciating than the one that came before. Vicious, white-hot agony striped every inch of me, and the pain eventually rose to a point where it couldn’t get any worse, fogging my mind until it went elsewhere, until I couldn’t even hear my own screams and incoherent cries any longer. It was all white noise in my head.

There was no point pleading any of the men for mercy anyway. There would be no mercy in this place. Not for me. Not for any woman. My hope dissolved more and more with every punch, every kick, every sting of the lash on already-broken flesh. Over and over and over. It was unbearable.

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