Page 15 of Hell and Halos
Eleanor's vault will be my grave. He will take me down there and lock the door and no one will hear me scream because that's the point of a vault.
And now Marcus will use that silence against me the way he used everything else. The pie. The catheter. The photographs on the cabin wall. The zip ties threaded through the headboard like he'd done it before.
He will clean me again.
He will wash Legion out of me—out of every place Legion has been, every place Legion has touched, every place where Legion's mouth, and hands, and cock have marked me as his—and this time there won't be a Colt to come with horses.
There won't be a Legion to kick down the door.
There will just be me, and Marcus, and the dark, and the smell of developer fluid and old paper, and he will do whatever he wants for as long as he wants because nobody is coming.
Nobody is coming because I sent them away.
Marcus's hand is still extended. Palm up. Waiting.
"After you, honey-dove."
I run for the door.
My bare feet hit the hardwood and I'm already screaming—not words, just sound, raw, and animal, and everything my body has been holding since I read that text—and my hand is almost on the handle, fingers already curling around the shape of it in the dark, almost—
His foot catches my ankle.
Clean. Efficient. Like he's done it before.
The floor comes up fast.
My chin takes most of it. Then my cheekbone. Then nothing.
The next thing I know, I'm looking up at my ceiling. The same one I've stared at since I was born. I'm being dragged. Inch by inch, my body slides across the floor.
Marcus has a death grip around my ankles, grunting with each heft of the dead weight. A crack in the ceiling travels past me like a road I'm leaving behind and I open my mouth but what comes out isn't a scream.
It's just air.
The closet light is on. Warm. Soft. The chandelier I picked out myself at nineteen because I thought it looked like something from a French farmhouse.
Marcus is humming a nursery rhyme.
It's “Hush, Little Baby."
But every few seconds, he's muttering words to the tune.
They're all wrong though.
Lock the door and dim the light,
Keep her quiet, keep her tight,
When she wakes, she'll understand—
Pretty dolls need a steady hand.
My eyes track the doorjamb of the closet door as I'm dragged underneath, then Marcus drops my feet and bends over me, his face so close to mine, I can smell his breath.
"See, that wasn't so hard."
His voice is the voice from the cabin. The same one that said open wide, and good girl, and I take good care of what's mine. Like we've done this before. Like we'll do it again. Like this is simply the natural order of things between us and I've just been confused about it.
