Page 52 of Ruthless Riches
It wasn’t just the needles he stuck in me that were filled with drugs. The food he left for me was always laced. The water, too.
I tried to resist the hunger and thirst for as long as I could while I was awake, but eventually it became too much. Then I’d pick up a bottle of water and down it all at once, and after that everything would go dark again.
After a while, my concept of time was in tatters, and I no longer had any idea how long I’d been trapped in this hellish tunnel cell. I remembered eating five or six times, though, so I figured that was probably the right amount of days.
The worst part of all this attempted memory-wiping torture wasn’t the pain. It was the fact that it was actually starting to work. I still remembered who I was and everything I’d ever done or experienced in my life, but it was starting to feel distant now, like it was all a series of events that happened to someone else. Sometimes, when I recalled certain people or events, it felt like I was watching an old movie on a low-resolution screen. It was so fuzzy and far away that it was difficult to tell if it was real or not.
There was one memory the Butcher could never wipe, though.
Nate.
He was etched too deeply in my memories; tethered too tightly to my existence. The Butcher could take everything else out of my mind, but he would never take that from me.
Never.
The next time I woke up, I heard a strange sound coming from somewhere in the tunnel. At first, I was so groggy that I thought it might be me making the sound, but I quickly realized it was coming from the cell opposite mine.
I stood up and moved closer to the bars, trying to figure out who or what was making the noise. It sounded like muffled crying.
As the fog of exhaustion slowly lifted, I realized I knew that cry. I’d heard it a hundred times before, whenever Sascha watched one of the depressing TV dramas she loved so much.
A burst of adrenaline shot through my veins, and I rattled the bars in front of me. “Sascha?”
I squinted into the dim tunnel as my voice echoed through it. I could see a shadowy figure in the opposite cell, slowly sitting up. Then a face appeared by the bars. “Lex? Is that you?”
“Yes. It’s me.” A lump appeared in my throat as I spoke. The Butcher really knew how to mess with me. I should’ve known he’d try something like this at some point.
“Oh my god, Lex. I thought you were…” Sascha trailed off as a sob escaped her mouth. “I was so scared,” she went on. “You’ve been gone for so long. I thought…”
She trailed off again, too shaken up to continue, and then the crying started again.
“I’m okay,” I said in the most reassuring voice I could muster up. “I’m alive.”
Sascha kept crying. She sounded like she was about to hyperventilate.
“Take a deep breath,” I called out to her. “I know it’s hard, but you have to try, okay?”
I heard her draw a shaky breath. Then I saw one of her hands grip the bars. “Where are we?” she asked. “What the hell is this place?”
I told her everything I knew about the private tunnels. By the time I was done, she was breathing rapidly again. “We’re really two stories underground?” she asked in a broken murmur.
“Yes.”
“Oh my god. Nate was right. He was right.” She sounded like she was hyperventilating again. “I can’t do this. I can’t…”
“Keep breathing. Slowly. In and out,” I said. “Come on. It’s okay.”
“No!” she screeched. “It’s not fucking okay, Alexis! What if there’s an earthquake and everything collapses on our heads?”
“There’s never been an earthquake on Avalon,” I said, telling her the same thing I told myself the other day while I was lying in the dark on my own.
In those moments, I’d felt the exact same fear she was feeling right now—that crushing sense of claustrophobia, along with the terror-stricken realization that I could be buried alive down here if anything happened to the tunnels.
“You said this place is old. What if it just collapses for no reason?” Sascha asked. Her voice had turned squeaky with panic.
“That won’t happen,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
I had no idea if that was true or not, but I didn’t want to add to her terror.
