Page 22 of Captive Souls

A man’s pet I wasn’t.

I stood up and left the room without touching another bite, storming into the bathroom, slamming the door and sinking against it before dropping onto the floor.

The bathroom door didn’t have a lock. No privacy. No barriers from him. Not that I thought a lock would stop him anyway. An illusion of safety was all it would be. I needed to rid myself of all illusions.

I was not safe with Knox. That much was painfully clear.

He wasn’t going to rape or torture me; I took him at his word on that—as naïve or stupid as that might be. I also took him at his word that he was going to break me.

Prior to that day, I would’ve said no man had that power, dumbly confident in my inner strength.

Yet right then, sitting on the bathroom floor, hyperventilating, never feeling more alone or hopeless, I knew Knox was going to ruin me.

It was just a matter of time.

And how many pieces he’d leave me in depended on how cruel he truly was.

Six

Knox

Iknew she was a vegetarian. Though my research into Piper Matthews was nowhere near as in depth as I would’ve liked, I’d gathered what information I could from her social media page.

She didn’t eat meat, she loved Taylor Swift, she ran every morning, she drank lattes at the same coffee shop every day, her favorite book was some fantasy title I’d never heard of but had inexplicably purchased and brought with me. And, she believed in the power of crystals, as if hunks of rock were useful as anything more than paperweights.

I couldn’t fathom the amount of shit people shared about themselves on the internet, desperate to have someone, anyone, know them. As if they didn’t realize that in the right hands, that was the key to their ruin.

Benign personal information was the key to breaking her. While doing my supply run, the majority of what I purchased were meat products, very little vegetables or grains. That was intentional. She’d initially stick to her morals, the belief system she’d held as a marker of her identity. Then she’d get hungry. Eventually, she’d sacrifice who she was in order to survive.

And that would chisel off a little of her self-worth. Self-respect.

We had just over a month. Ideally, I would’ve had longer to draw out the process, have it be more subtle, but we didn’t have time. And now that I was stuck in a cabin with her, a month seemed like it might breakme.

Such thoughts were obviously a sign of my mind finally fracturing. Madness was the only viable explanation for these feelings. Some five-foot-nothing civilian who smelled of peaches did not have the power to break me.

No one did.

Only me.

Only I had that power. And it was happening. All of my sins—committed in the name of survival, to feed that ravenous darkness inside of me—were finally eating at me. There would never be enough death, blood or depravity to keep me sane. I’d known that for a while.

Bad timing more than anything else.

But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t accomplish my goal. That I wouldn’t rip apart Piper and ensure she’d be begging to be taken to Stone.

Maybe my madness would help in doing just that. Or perhaps I’d bring us both down.

I hadn’t slept in days.

There had been too much to do. To prepare. I’d snatched a couple of hours here and there. I only slept a handful of hours on any given night anyway. Nightmares slithered in if I slept too deeply and for too long.

But this was less than even I was used to. I’d settled onto the sofa, hoping my body might shut down. Though I didn’t think it was possible for me to lapse into unconsciousness, knowing that Piper was in the same room as me. She was sleeping; I could hear the soft sighs coming from her, her body still.

When her breathing settled, and I stopped seeing any movement in the bed, I got up.

I wasn’t prone to making bad decisions. Every choice I made was calculated, precise, all possible consequences weighed.

Going anywhere near Piper for the purpose of doing anything other than breaking her will was a unilaterally bad decision.