Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(148)

She is convinced that this is her only chance, that she has only moments before he tires of her audience. “I’m going to kill him. Are you going to help me or not?”

“This is what you think when you are an animal. You think, am I predator or am I prey? Am I climbing into a mouth or am I widening my jaws?”

“Your niece—”

He yanks the pitchfork from the ground and holds it before his face and stares at her through its silvery tines. “I am widening my jaws.”





Chapter 61



MIRIAM KNOWS she is in a basement, but she does not know where. The room is twelve paces by twelve paces. The walls are concrete. When it rains, water dribbles from a crack in the corner. The floor is slick there from mildew. Light leaks from a shallow window made from glass blocks.

There was a short-lived time when they merely kept her locked in the room. She picked at the glass-block window until one fingernail broke and another peeled back. Then she swept off the mattress and wrenched up the frame and slammed one of its posts four times against the window, chipping it, cracking it, but by then two lycans rushed in and wrestled her down and taught her a lesson. That’s what they call it: teaching her a lesson.

She never seems to learn. She bit the eyeball of one guard, blinded him. She crushed the windpipe of another with her elbow. That was when they began handcuffing her to the bed. First her hands. Then, when she scissored her legs and broke someone’s nose, her ankles too.

She bucked her body and rattled the bed frame and strained against the cuffs until they cut her skin. And the men would come in, one after the other, and teach her a lesson. Months pass in this way. She is a hole. She is a hole into which a knife fits.

Now her body feels as if it is collapsing inward. She stops spitting and yelling at them. Her eyes are dry but her bedsores weep. They feed her through a straw or with a spoon and she pisses and shits into a pan. She lies as still as a corpse. Her stare goes unfocused and settles on some middle distance beyond the drop ceiling. Every now and then she will hear the shrill voice of a mouse or the shuddering of a pipe or the groan of a footstep overhead. Otherwise, there is nothing to occupy her but the possibility of what exists high above and beyond the gray faces of these walls with mold vining across them—and how she might escape, how her life depends on fleeing this room, her future so much easier to study than a past in which crouch the shadows of her child and husband.

She hears someone enter the room but does not turn her head. She can smell him—the cologne applied thickly as if to hide some stink. And she can hear him—the openmouthed smack of bubblegum. Puck leans over her. She keeps her gaze unfocused even when he leans in and sniffs her.

He picks up her hand, lets it fall. The hand he sliced the fingers from. To make them even. This was more than a month ago, when he plugged an iron into the wall. Then pulled out a pair of garden shears. He opened and closed them, opened and closed them, making a rusty song. He was watching the iron. When it began to hiss and burble with steam, when the orange light on its handle blinked off and indicated it was ready, he took her hand and snipped off one finger, then the other, right at the knuckle. The blood sizzled and the flesh cooked when he pressed the iron to the stumps, cauterizing them. The wound has healed but remains an angry red.

He picks up the hand again and takes the thumb in his mouth. He sucks on it, then bites down. She does not react, though she wants to scream, to pull away from him. With blood on his lips, he says, “Just a taste of what’s to come.”

She is of no use to the Resistance. She has done nothing to terribly wrong them. Her capture and punishment have everything to do with this one man. This little man made big by his wretched desire. He tells her she is filthy. She is disgusting. She is so vile that he cannot maintain an erection. He tells her she is the reason—she and her wretched niece—they are the reason he is pocked with scars. Scissors, bullets, knives. All instruments of torture he will look forward to introducing her to. His voice softens when he says, “Don’t think I’m going to kill you. That would be too kind. You’re going to be around for a long time, my pet.”

His face hangs over her for a long time, studying her, waiting for some response.

“I know you can hear me,” he says.

A part of her can’t, the part of her that no longer feels alive, and a part of her can, the part of her that remains coiled and ready to spring once given the chance.



*



Chase feels extraordinary. He feels better than he has in years. For too long he has felt outside himself, as if he were watching a show on the television across the room, only distantly aware that he was the lead actor fumbling through his lines. Now he is so conscious, hyperattuned to the mottled texture of the wall, the pebble stuck to the tread of his shoe, the rank cloud of perfume trailing a woman down the hall. His belly has shrunk and tightened. The veins are beginning to rise out of his skin again. He grows a beard, despite Buffalo demanding he shave, telling him that the public believes a man with a beard is a man with something to hide. Instead of slumping often into a chair, he paces or runs in place or shadowboxes or pounds out push-ups. He cannot sit still.

The other day, in the West Wing, he met with the secretary of agriculture about food security. He had that dreamy glow about him that comes from two beers on an empty stomach, and he crossed his feet on the desk while she sat across from him smelling like honey and wearing a powder-blue power suit with a black lace bra blooming from her blouse. “The conversation so far has been about oil and uranium. Food and water need to be on the agenda. We’ve lost thousands of hectares of farmland in Oregon and Washington.”