Page 50 of Talk to Me

I had every intention of bringing hell with us.

Chapter

Sixteen

PATCH

Voices.

Boots on the ground.

I slid my eyes open, not totally, just a fraction. Two guards stood outside of my cell. The first one entered the code. I followed the track of his fingers. I had the first three and the last two. I just needed one more number.

The squeak of the cell door opening registered. I didn’t react though. They were coming in whether I liked it or not. The past couple of “sessions” had been brutal. They’d gone to drugs for questioning. If I focused enough on songs, it worked. I didn’t do anything other than sing and scream.

I’d half-destroyed my voice. This morning, like the past couple, a pair of guards strode in without a word and dragged me upward by my arms. They hauled me between them like a pair of silent ghouls all the way down the hall.

The click of their boots against the tiled floor played like some countdown to my next horror-filled hours. The room they pulled me into was painfully white.

The light seemed to reflect off every surface. I squinted, then had to close my eyes. The brightness assaulted me with sharp jabs at my eyes and lancing cuts to my eyelids. Even squeezed closed, I couldn’t escape it.

They slammed me into a chair, the bruising went up my spine and forced all the air out of me.

“Good morning, Miss Brady,” my tormentor greeted me as he strode into the room. I could barely slit my eyes apart. They hadn’t lashed me to the seat and it was taking way too much effort to not just fall over.

My tormentor dressed in a buttoned down shirt, and tie. His shirt was pale blue. His pants were a darker shade of blue. A contrast for his white lab coat.

“Are you feeling more cooperative today?” He cupped my chin and lifted my face up so he could examine me. I didn’t bother with responding. The only answers he wanted were not answers I would ever give.

Playing at being broken was not all that difficult. The pain was almost constant now. The pain in my extremities. In my chest. The cramps. They barely fed me. Fluids were regularly given during these sessions, but only to make feeding me drugs easier.

I had no idea where I was. What time of year it was or day.

Hell, I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been here.

Time no longer had meaning. I stared at my tormentor without staring at him. I barely flinched when he shone a pin light in my eyes. This room was so damn lit, how else was I supposed to react?

“Hmm…” He continued to flick the light from one eye to the other. I just kept them unfocused and staring into the distance.

It was impossible to miss his tense expression. The salt and pepper of his hair gave him a distinguished air. But his face was narrower, his cheekbones a slash. Worst, he had the palest blue eyes. So pale they might as well be colorless.

I hated looking in his eyes.

If they really were the window to the soul, then his was utterly absent.

“Problem?” A second interrogator entered the room. This one didn’t usually speak. Though he had been the one working over my neighbor. I’d seen him slapping her repeatedly.

The fact he didn’t enter my line of sight kept me from getting a better look at him. Every other time he’d been present, he’d been behind me. My would-be Tomás de Torquemada dug his fingers into my chin. The bite of his nails threatened to break the skin.

Leaning closer, he exhaled his coffee breath all over me. There was a fresh new hell. I hadn’t had coffee since I’d woken up in this hellish place.

I missed coffee.

My eyes watered when he angled my head back so I ended up staring at the lights. A single tear tracked down my cheeks.

“Maybe we should just give her to the guards,” the second man suggested. “They can have a bit of fun and she’ll finally accept that we can and will do whatever we want with her.”

Tormentor number one gave my jaw a shake then let me go. I just let my head drop. It hurt the back of my neck, but I didn’t care. Now my vision was fixed on the floor. The tiles hadn’t changed. There was still a drain near the center.