Page 3 of Room Ten: Praise Times Three

“We’ll have a camera trained on you at all times, so I suggest you be a good little girl, and you might survive this.” Her voice trails off as she walks away, leaving me in the room with the two men.

The guy who looks like a frat boy—his eyes turn shrewd as he really looks at me. He turns to the other man, who hasn’t taken his eyes off me once. “I wonder if she’s as much of a cock tease as her sister?”

“I hope she’s a fighter.”

Frat boy laughs. “You do like to get bloody, don’t you?”

The other guy reaches down and grabs his dick. “Fuck, it makes me hard just thinking about it.”

“You are a sick man.” Frat boy walks out, laughing as he proceeds down the hallway.

The big guy points to the box. “Sorry it’s not gourmet, sweetheart, but it’ll keep you alive for a couple of days.”

Reaching back, he pulls the door shut behind him, closing us in the room together.

I drop one foot to the ground, prepared to run, and he flashes me a smile.

“Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.” He lurches forward, and I jump up to crawl over the bed, but he catches my ankle, pulling me to a stop. Again, he flips me as if I weigh nothing, throwing me to my back, his body covering mine. “Where are you going?”

I struggle underneath him, turning my face away from his hot breath on my cheek. “Get off me.”

He jerks his hips forward, and he wasn’t joking about how this makes him hard. He puts his mouth over my ear. “I can’t wait to fuck you, but until then...”

Bouncing off of me, he grabs my yoga pants and rips them off of my legs again. This time, he also pulls down my underwear, leaving me completely bare from the waist down. “I want you sitting in here naked, waiting until I get back. Who knows? Maybe you’ll miss me, but I hope not. I really hope not. I hope you sit here thinking about how much you hate me, how much you want to hurt me, and how much you want to fight me, taking every little shred of your innocence away.”

He walks out with my yoga pants and panties in hand, lifting them to his face and inhaling deeply. “See you soon.”

The door slams behind him, and once again, a series of locks are engaged. I count four total. Two are deadbolts, but the keyed locks are inside the room, which means I have no way to keep them from reentering whenever they want. They were obviously thinking ahead because the door swings out versus in, so the momentary thought I have about putting the chair in front of the door to barricade it is rendered moot. I have no way to protect myself—no weapons to use. I sit and wait, listening as muffled voices talk down what seems like a long hallway.

After a long time of relative silence, there is movement in the locks again. Once more, I put one foot on the ground, knowing that being agile is my only defense. The door swings open, and the woman walks in, her face distorted and flushed with anger. She has a phone in her hand; the speaker engaged.

It rings three times before my father speaks. “This is Walter Krushner.”

She screams into the handheld. “Why didn’t you tell me I had the wrong daughter when we spoke this morning? Is this one even worth thirty million to you?”

My eyes widen. Thirty million is a lot for most people, but not my father. Still, it’s an odd number, and I’m wondering why they would have picked it.

To my surprise, Epi’s voice comes through the receiver. “You son of a bitch! Let my sister go.”

The woman looks surprised, but a calm smile takes over her face, and her demeanor changes instantly. “Epi, Epi, Epi. I had no idea you had a twin sister. You’ve never mentioned her. Should I do to her all the things I was going to do to you?”

My father’s voice cracks, a rare display of emotion I haven’t seen in ten years. “Don’t hurt her. Please, we’ll pay whatever you want.”

Having my father speak seems to make something snap within the woman. She screams out her frustration and steps aside as the big man rushes back into the room and hauls me up out of the chair.

I can’t help it.

I scream.

He backhands me, sending me sprawling across the dirty mattress.

The woman looks at me for a moment, her features softening a little. She waves her hand, and the man leaves me to walk past her down the hall.

She stands in the doorway, glaring down at me as she speaks to my sister. “It’s amazing. She looks just like you, and yet she’s nothing like you. At first, I thought it was because you put on a public persona for the cameras and that this is the real you. It’s the birthmark on her leg that finally clued me in. She never once told me I was calling her by the wrong name. Do you know what kind of sister you have here that would risk torture to keep you safe?”

She closes the door and once again, the locks engage. Time drags on, and I hear very little from the other side of the door. Then a car rolls up to the house, followed by a door slamming shut. From my window, I see nothing but trees and the front of the tan van, making it obvious I’m not in some normal, run-of-the-mill neighborhood with houses stacked on either side of each other. For all I know, I’m in a trailer in the middle of nowhere.

The TV comes on at the same time I hear more car doors slam. I run back to the window and see the tan van pulling back from the house. I don’t know why, but I exhale the breath I’ve been holding, the tension in my shoulders subsiding the tiniest bit.

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