Collared(57)

“No. Never. I slept in it, showered in it. It never came off.”

“So you never had a chance to escape? To get away from him?” Reyes’s index finger taps the table like she’s knocking at something.

“Never.”

Her finger stops tapping. “So you weren’t aware that when we found you, the end of chain wasn’t tied up to anything?”

My throat goes dry, but I know I’ve heard her wrong. “What?”

Burnside and Reyes exchange a look.

Reyes leans in closer. “The other end of the chain you were tied to wasn’t connected to anything. It was just sitting on the basement floor. There was a padlock attached to one of the links, but we have no idea when Jackson unlocked it.” Reyes pauses, looking at me. “Do you?”

The ground feels like it’s crumbling beneath my chair. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I heard you right.” I shake my head, trying to clear it. “Did you just say I wasn’t chained to anything when you found me?”

That can’t be what she said. I know I heard her wrong. There’s no way he took off the lock keeping me there so I could get away. There’s no way he would have chanced me getting away . . . unless he knew that I’d accepted the chain and would never try to fight it . . .

God, I’m the baby elephant. Actually, I’m the adult elephant whose will to fight’s been crushed.

Whatever’s left of my soul detaches and dissipates into the dark.

“When we found you, no, the chain wasn’t attached to anything. You weren’t tied to anything that would have forced you to stay there.” Reyes exhales, and I can tell from the way her expression falters that this next question will be a hard one. “Did Jackson ever leave the house?”

I nod, knowing where she’s going.

“Why didn’t you try to escape, Jade? Why didn’t you try to get away?” For the first time, I hear emotion in Reyes’s voice.

My head is spinning, and I feel like I’ve just been thrown in that closet again. All sense of time and direction and meaning drain from me. I’m floating in a black vacuum.

“I didn’t know . . . I didn’t try. I just stopped trying after a while and gave up.” My voice is shaking, but I’m not crying. I think this is what shock feels like.

“So you don’t think Jackson freed your chain because he was letting you go?” Reyes asks.

My head lowers. “No, he did it because he knew he’d broken me.”





Ten Years Ago




I’VE HEARD IT said that love makes us weak. It makes us weak because our survival instincts, along with our reasoning, become dulled. We first consider every move through the filter of that love. In a way, what we love makes us better people, more intuitive and less impulsive.

In another way, it makes us worse. It turns us into an immoral, corrupt being that knows no bounds when it comes to protecting what it loves.

I’ve come to accept that what we love makes us weak. I’ve learned something else on my own though, ever since becoming a prisoner of this black room—what we love is what kills us too.

I want to die. My will to survive has been extinguished. My hope of being found has been consumed by this black world. Even my anger has been tempered into something so dull I can’t feel its heat boil in my veins anymore.

I’ve been missing for weeks. Maybe months. Hopefully not years, but I know that along with hope, I’ve lost all sense of time. The chance of finding a missing person after one week is one in one hundred. The chance of finding a missing child in my situation after the same time is one in one thousand.

Every day that ticks by, those odds get worse. Every second that ticks past feels like another nail pounded into my coffin. I’m dead to the world. I’m practically dead to myself.

A few sleeps ago, I woke up and couldn’t remember my name. It passed in a few moments, but in that span of grappling for my name, I came to realize that I’m slowly breaking away. Piece by piece is falling into a black abyss I’ll never be able to collect them from. They’re gone forever.

Nothing can be plastered into those crumbled places either. Nothing. So when the last of me crumbles away, I’ll just be gone. Too empty to even become a ghost.

Gone. That’s what I feel like.

Dead. That’s what I wish I could be.

I haven’t screamed in dozens of sleeps—that’s how I now measure time, in sleeps—because screaming doesn’t do anything but hurt me. I’ve stopped kicking at the walls in hopes someone will hear because hope was the first thing to wither. I don’t claw at the walls anymore, looking for a weak spot, because I know the only weak thing in this black world is me.

What I love has made me weak.

It’s what I’m holding on to that’s responsible for wishing myself dead. If it weren’t for the life I had that I’m still clinging to, this wouldn’t be such a stark contrast. If it weren’t for everything and everyone I loved back in that life, I wouldn’t feel like I’ve been dropped into the worst place on earth.

Maybe if I don’t cling to that life so hard . . . maybe if I don’t hold onto those people I loved . . . maybe if I don’t still grasp how crazy I loved him, this will be easier. Maybe if I build a wall between the two worlds, I can find some shadow of a new life.