I put my hand over my mouth to hide my smile, but it’s there, blinding and unstoppable. They’re so sweet together. Almost enough to break through the ice around me, even without Damon Scott around. Almost.
I read a well-worn copy of Quantitative Risk Analysis late into the night, past dog-ears and highlighted lines. Gabriel knows this book well. Only a few times do I stop and leave notes in the margins, adding to what his sprawling script has written.
Once I correct him, laying out my argument in a few lines, wondering if he’ll ever find this. They’re a different kind of breadcrumb. My kind.
By the time I get to the chapter on volatility in valuation, it’s midnight.
My eyelids slip lower and lower with every slow blink. I can’t think anymore tonight.
Can’t use the numbers to keep away the loneliness.
I reach over and flip off the lamp, dousing the room in shadows. I keep the bathroom light on all night, a holdover from the first days after the attack. From longer than that, if I’m honest. The light that slid between my plastic blinds was a comfort. And the heavy drapes in this house, the tinting on the rooms, the luxury of darkness that rich people seem to crave sometimes feels like a muzzle.
Sleep laps its gentle waves against me. There are no strong currents on the surface. It’s deceptive, how softly it lulls me. How many times will I believe and hope and pray to find peace there? To drift on the lazy river of my mind.
No matter how softly it begins I’m always dragged under.
The dream comes in a tidal wave, wrapping my body in terror.
In my dream I’m back in the mental hospital. In my dream, I never left. The walls are coated with something black and pungent, the floor slick. Pain slices my scalp as he drags me by my hair.
He strides with cool familiarity through the hallways, like he’s been here a million times. Like he lives here. My body may as well be on fire, that’s how much the pain and fear scorch me, that’s how much I scream. In the molten center is the certainty that Damon Scott went through this.
Not something similar. This exactly. In this horrible place.
He knows these walls. These floors.
He knows the cracked placard that says Recreation Room in front of us.
There are a million funhouse horrors that a recreation room might hold. They flash through my brain like a demented slideshow, promising that this will be worse than what came before—worse than the stabbing pain in my body and the shame in my heart. And even so, I could not have predicted this.
I could not have foretold about the pool.
It’s large and rectangular, like the kind at my YMCA. Only instead of pale white concrete it’s made from tile, green and thin and cracked in a thousand places. Nothing that could be operational today. And it’s not operational, strictly speaking. There isn’t water. There couldn’t be water, not with the thick cracks in the concrete. As if the whole foundation has shifted over the decades, nature reclaiming what was hers.
I want to slide into the cracks, even though they’re a couple inches wide. I want to disappear into the center of the earth. He told me I’d want to die, and he’s right, he’s right, he’s right.
He tosses me into the pit. My knees make a loud crack with the fall. I know there’s pain, but it doesn’t register. Not with anticipation clawing at my throat, knowing what will come next. The pool may be empty, but there’s something a little damp down here. A little slippery. I stagger, trying to stand, struggling to find that sliver of hope that says I’ll make it out alive.
“Don’t worry,” he says, soft enough I almost don’t hear. “This will help you, too.”
In the corner the thick roots of a tree have broken through the tile in the far end, leaving a wide chasm. That split narrows to a thick crack near the bottom. A little more and water wouldn’t hold.
The monster above me turns a knob.
A steel pipe juts out of the wall. It pours water into the pool, leaving a small puddle at my feet. My heart beats a slow rhythm, like it can’t believe this. Like it knows better than to panic.
Like this can’t possibly be real.
When I was little I fought the current. I kicked and paddled, struggling to get to the surface. Now I stand very still as the water rises to my ankles, knowing it won’t possibly help.
There aren’t sharp rocks at the bottom. Only a dark vegetation grown over tile.
Water rises, dark in the ancient Recreation Room, almost as black as the bottom. The mermaid tank was beautiful, mostly because the water was clear. And I knew the river was different because it was dark. Like this.
And then Jonathan Scott reaches for a lever. There’s something metal and thin leaning against the wall above me. My mind can’t process what it is. My mind doesn’t want to process what it is, even as he lowers the grate over the top of the pool.
Some dark part of me recognizes it as some primitive safety device.
That dark part of me laughs.
The water level will rise. The grate will keep me under water. “Please no,” I whisper, unable to stop myself. There’s no way it will work, no way I can stop myself from trying.
He looks almost sad. “Don’t panic. You’ll only lose your head.”
My nails press so hard into my palms they draw blood. There will be crescent shaped wounds in my hands, but I won’t be alive to see them. “Don’t do this to me,” I say, my voice shaking. “I’ll do anything. Anything.”
“You’ll do everything, lovely peach.”
What does he want from me? What does he want from Damon? The water tickles my knees, weirdly harmless as it rises. Deadly once it’s done. “I’ll make the money back. Work in the clubs. For sex. Anything. Don’t do this to me. Please.”
“Do you know, when I first got here, they still did lobotomies. How barbaric is that?”
“This is barbaric,” I scream at him. “Let me out. Oh my God, let me out of here.”
Lobotomies. Is that what happened to him? Is that why he’s insane?
He smiles a little, like he can read my thoughts. “They did many cruel things, but not this. This was beautiful. I fought it at first. That’s the weakness inside us. It’s a gift to make you stronger.”
This is how Damon learned to hold his breath so long. This is what he ran away from. This very pool with its green tile and black water. And this is why I deserve what’s happening. Because I sent him here. He came back to this for me.
Chapter Eighteen
“Trigonometry,” says a voice in the darkness.
For one bittersweet moment I flash into the past, a little girl lost, afraid and alone. With only a wild boy to save me. He had seemed like not enough at first. And then he’d been all I wanted.
I sit up in bed, my gaze finding a silhouette in the corner.
There’s no wild boy left in him. Even in shadow he’s made of long planes and crisp corners. He reclines in a chair, his long leg kicked out, one hand dangling down holding a glass. His other hand holds a book open, a stark sliver of light across the white page.
You came back, I want to shout.
Except that might make him leave. Maybe he actually is still wild underneath all that expensive linen and wool. I have to tread carefully so I don’t spook him.