And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(25)



The girl froze.

“Do you?”

She didn’t respond.

Emmett set the flashlight on the overturned bucket, then reached for the collar of her sweatshirt. He brought the knife to her throat. “Don’t move. Don’t even breathe,” he said.

The girl shook uncontrollably. When she closed her eyes and turned away from him, he felt the urge to pause, to study her face, but didn’t.

The knife was sharp as could be. He slit the girl’s top from the neck to the hem at the bottom, then laid it open. He felt something heavy in the front pocket but was distracted by the sight of her body and the things attached to it. Her abdomen was covered in bruises in different shades of purple and yellow. To the right of her navel was a gray disk the size of a silver dollar held in place under clear adhesive tape. On her left side was a similar-sized button, but this one had a thin tube coming out of it that disappeared into the folds of her sweatshirt.

“The hell is all this?”

He followed the tube through an opening inside her sweatshirt to a blue device smaller than a pack of cigarettes. Shining the flashlight on it, he squinted through one eye to read the buttons and the small screen. “Insulin,” he read aloud.

He dropped the device and got a finger between her cheek and the gag and pulled it below her chin.

“You got diabetes,” he said.

She nodded.

“This thing gives you insulin through this tube?”

Nod.

She was wearing some kind of athletic bra underneath the sweatshirt. He cut the straps and the sides and pulled it away. She bucked and said “No, don’t!” as he yanked at the buttons on her jeans. He knocked her on the side of the head with the back of his hand.

“Don’t fight me.”

She stilled and he sawed through the thick fabric near the fly, then all the way down her damaged leg. Dried blood had glued the fabric to her skin. She screamed when he peeled it away and revealed a constellation of red welts in her thigh from the birdshot. Fresh blood rose from her wounds.

He cut away her jeans on the other side. She was wearing blue panties, stained with blood and urine. He took a long look between her legs at the mound of flesh and the crinkle of hair under the fabric before he cut the panties on both sides.

The dying flashlight gave off only the faintest orange glow as Emmett stepped back and looked at what he’d uncovered. The girl was naked, stretched long and taut like a pig carcass. She was sobbing and shaking, but Emmett could only hear the sound of his own breathing and the roar of blood in his ears. She looked alien in this room, in this light, with her buttons and tubes, like something that should have been under glass or preserved in fluids.

The room felt smaller than usual with the two of them together in the near dark. He ran his fingers across her bruised belly and watched her skin break out in gooseflesh.

He put away the knife. Her clothes were in a pile on the floor. He pushed them through the doorway with his feet and came back with a brown wool blanket that he dropped on top of her before unlocking the padlock keeping her hands pulled behind her head. Now she had enough slack in the chain to sit up with her hands in her lap or stand next to the bed.

“I need…water,” the girl whispered.

“What?”

“Water…please,” she said.

He left her, taking the flashlight, and found an empty beer can in the garbage and filled it with tap water from the basement sink. When he came back, the girl was sitting with the blanket pulled up to hide her nakedness. She shivered and winced in pain as she took the can of water and drank it quickly. “Please take me to a doctor. It hurts so bad.” She cringed as her raw nerves lit up again.

“I’m the doctor around here.”

“Please.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry… I just want to go home. We didn’t mean any harm.”

Emmett grabbed her by the ear and twisted it. “It harms me when my pills get stolen!” he thundered. The girl shrank from his touch, small enough he thought he could swallow her whole and suck the meat off her bones.

He yelled into her face. “Why couldn’t you leave me alone? I’m an old man. I wasn’t hurting anybody.”

Three times before now they’d broken into his house and stolen his pills and anything else of value they could get their hands on. He couldn’t figure out why him or what he’d done to draw their attention.

“Do you know what it’s like to come home and see your door standing open? Your windows broken? I’ve been afraid to leave my house. Now you come in the night while I’m sleeping because I never leave my pills behind when I’m gone. I need those pills for my pain,” he said. “I need to live in peace.”

The girl sobbed. “I’m sorry,” she cried.

Emmett leaned against the wall next to the door. Wanda had cried like that, begged him to let her go. Nothing he did to make this room less sad or scary for her had worked. It was never supposed to be a dungeon. He’d built it and painted it and put nice things in it for her. The chains were supposed to be temporary. Until there was trust.

He turned the knife in his pocket a few times, then took it out and scratched under his belly with the hilt. “What’s your name?”

The girl’s breath hitched in the middle of the word that came out. Emmett grunted in surprise, pushing himself away from the wall. “Did you say Jeannie?”

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