by Stella Hart
If they would just tell me what they had in store for me, that would calm me down a little bit, even if what they had in store for me was death, because at least I’d finally know. At least I could mentally prepare for it. But instead, I was cruelly left in the dark, never told anything at all. Never able to prepare for whatever came next. Things would inevitably be sprung on me out of the blue.
If anything ever happened at all, that is. Right now, it seemed as if I’d been left here to rot. As if I was being punished, trapped in solitary confinement like a criminal.
The thoughts of the constant isolation and abandonment made my mind drift to my friend Greer. A few days ago, a vague suspicion had taken root in my mind when I remembered an article she sent me when I first decided to write about secret societies for my class paper. Greer had always been into conspiracy theories, and even though she thought Crown and Dagger was essentially a glorified frat, she’d once read some things about other secret societies that she thought I might find interesting.
At the time, I thought it was a load of crap, but now I wondered if there was some merit to it after all.
The article she sent me was about a now-defunct CIA program called MK-Ultra which operated between 1953 and 1973. Their mission was to develop mind control drugs and techniques. They experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, sexual abuse and other forms of torture. Many unwilling civilian and military subjects were used in testing, and the program was eventually shut down after all the controversy.
One of the alleged experiments was for the development of ‘beta slaves’—sex slaves who were programmed using mind control techniques and trained to ignore any inhibitions in order to serve a master (or many masters) in sexual ways. The ‘programming’ involved mental and physical torture, making them swap pain for pleasure deep in their minds. This torture they endured during training was supposed to destroy something called ‘the sacred feminine’ in order to turn them into nothing more than a piece of meat to be used and abused by the master at any given time.
According to the article Greer sent me, certain secret societies and criminal organizations had supposedly used these ‘beta slave’ training techniques to create willing sex slaves to serve them.
Perhaps that was what Crown and Dagger did to women. Perhaps that was exactly what was happening to me right now. I could be in the very first stage of the programming process, where the men in charge would attempt to mentally break a woman via imprisonment and isolation.
The sick thing was, if that were the case, then it was actually working on me, as much as I hated to admit it. I’d been so neglected and deprived in these last couple of weeks that I actually wanted someone in this godforsaken hellhole to come in and touch me, just so I could feel the warmth and connection of a hand that wasn’t mine. Even if the hand in question was delivering a cold-water slap to my face. I just wanted to feel something, anything.
I was losing my mind.
Sometimes I felt lucid, in control. Other times I felt like I were in a dream state, and none of this was real. I would drift off in my mind and start to think that at any minute, my friends would jump out with party hats and streamers, and I would find out it was all a huge, elaborate prank.
I suddenly sat bolt upright on my bed.
Shit. My friends!
I couldn’t believe this hadn’t occurred to me before now. In all the days or weeks I’d been kept here, I hadn’t thought about anyone’s welfare other than my own. It was horribly selfish. Considering the reach and influence Crown and Dagger had, my friends could all be in serious danger.
The society had watched me and followed me for a long time, as Tobias had informed me, and that meant they knew who my friends were. Not only that, they knew about the paper I wanted to write, and Greer, Willa and Mellie had all helped me with ideas for it.
Greer and Willa had helped me figure out how to sneak into the Tap Week party, and Mellie had helped me sneak into the second-level ceremony. Greer and Willa were probably fine—I hoped—seeing as Crown and Dagger apparently let people sneak in to the lower-level parties all the time. But Mellie… she could be in serious trouble.
When she’d managed to get into her father’s office and found his laptop mysteriously unlocked, she’d seen it as an incredible stroke of luck. At the time, we couldn’t believe it, but now I realized that we should’ve been far more suspicious of that so-called luck. No one got that lucky. Mellie’s dad had probably been told by the rest of the society to leave his computer unlocked when his daughter was around, knowing full well about our plan to sneak me onto the actress spreadsheet.
We’d both been played like fiddles.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I murmured, praying Mellie was unscathed. Perhaps they would be more lenient with her, given her father’s place in the society.
Or maybe she was right here in a cell too, being tortured horribly…
Guilty tears sprang to my eyes, and a grim chant started in my mind. My fault, my fault, my fault.
A face appeared in the thick pane of the door a moment later. It was Elias. He simply stood there watching me fight back the tears, a hungry look in his striking green-blue eyes. He didn’t come here often, but when he did, he would look at me for a while as if I were an animal in a zoo and then stride away without a word.
I jumped up, anger temporarily replacing my fear and sadness. “Stop staring at me, you sick fuck!” I screamed through the door.
I wasn’t sure if he could actually hear me, given how thick the door and glass pane were, but it made me feel better to yell at him anyway. I might be craving human company, but not his. He and his father were the sickest bastards known to mankind, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want anything to do with them.
The other day, I’d shocked the hell out of Elias when he came to look at me. I’d just been given a tray of mashed potatoes and salad to eat, and instead of eating the mash, I’d picked some up between my fingers and smeared it all over the glass pane so that it was too clouded for him to see me properly. I hadn’t been able to stop laughing after that, giggling away for the first time in far too long, and I’d subsequently learned what the orange juice in this place was like.
The nurse from my first day here was right. When the guards came in and gave it to me for my insolent behavior, it knocked me out almost immediately, and when I woke the next day, I was dizzy and disoriented, my memories all gone until it finally wore off. It was the strangest feeling, remembering all these things I’d already forgotten and remembered once before.
My door was clean when I woke, of course, and Elias came back to stare at me like the fucking smug creep he was.
I flipped a middle finger at him and went back to lie on my bed, inching over to the very edge of it and facing away, just so I could be as far away from his lecherous gaze as possible. As I snuggled into a curled up position, my hand fell into an indented spot on the mattress.
Strange.
I sat up to look at it, keeping it covered with the thin blanket so Elias wouldn’t know what I was doing. There was a reason the spot sank inward slightly. One of the coiled mattress springs beneath it had come loose. I could see part of it sticking out of a tiny hole in the fabric on the side of the bed.
My heart skipped a beat. All the promises I’d made myself about attaining freedom came flooding back to me in a giddy rush. This spring could be useful for when I finally found a way to escape. If I managed to pull it out and uncoil the wire, it could make a decent improvised weapon.
I rolled back over and stared at the door until Elias left. Then I quickly set to work on the mattress. I ripped the hole in the fabric so that it was a little bigger—but not so big it would attract a lot of attention if a guard or nurse ever came in here—and then I deftly worked the spring out. It took a while and was a lot harder than I thought, but finally, I wrenched it free. A triumphant grin quirked up my lips as I uncoiled it.
Now I just had to find somewhere to hide it.
I went over to the door and looked through the glass pane, just to make sure no one was coming down the hall in either direction. Then I stood up on the bed and reached into the air vent on the wall, carefully placing the wire around one of the slats so that it wasn’t easy to see but would be easy to pull out if I wanted it in an emergency.
I couldn’t sit down after that. Thoughts of escape and freedom were heavy on my mind again, and for the first time in what felt like forever, I was excited. Inspired. What else had I missed in all my days of gloom-and-doom moping? What other things could this room be hiding from me?
I began to search everywhere, painstakingly tapping on the walls and every part of the floor for anything that sounded different to the rest. Under the bed, behind the toilet… everywhere.
One of the stones in the gray wall on my left sounded strangely hollow when I tapped it. I tapped it again, harder, and to my shock and amazement, it swung outward to reveal an old lever.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, hoping to god I wasn’t hallucinating.
I tentatively reached forward and pulled the lever down. There was a heavy grinding sound for several seconds, and then a third of the stone ‘wall’ swung open to reveal a hidden doorway.
Oh my god. It was a secret passage.
I pinched myself, hard. Surely this was a dream.
When I didn’t wake up, I stepped through the doorway into the darkness beyond. My eyes quickly adjusted. I was in an old tunnel. It was cold and damp, and the floor was littered with dead leaves, bits of paper and dirt. For a second, I caught a whiff of salt air, slicing through the dank scent of mold and grime. Wherever this place was, it might be near the coastline.
I kept walking, my feet crunching over the leaves and paper. I seemed to be heading upward at quite a steep angle, which made me wonder if my cell was actually underground. Every so often, a chilling gust of wind would blow through from somewhere, scattering more leaves and debris, twirling them in the dank air. No signs of life in here. No signs of anyone else even knowing about this place.
That was a good sign for me. I quickened my steps, spurred on by the promise of freedom. Then I reached the end of the tunnel, and my heart sank. It was a dead end, just a wall packed with stone and brick.
The wind had to be coming from somewhere, though. Frantically, I turned and dashed down the tunnel in the opposite direction. When I reached the end, I saw it wasn’t bricked off like the other side, but it may as well be. There was a door with a barred window where the breeze was slipping through, but it was heavy and locked. I couldn’t even try to use the bedspring to pick the lock, because it was an electronic lock which required a keycard, just like the one in my room.
I sank to the ground, sobbing into my knees as I drew them up around my chest and rocked back and forth. The society knew all about the tunnel. Of course they did. They probably left the trick wall in my room just to mock me and let me think I had a chance of escape only to rip it away when I realized I was still locked in after all.
I was wrong all those days ago when I thought there would be some way for me to get out of this place. So very wrong and naïve.
There was no way out. No escape.
This was my life now.
10
Tatum
Someone finally came for me about three days after I discovered the secret tunnel leading out of my room. That horrible tunnel which held nothing but salt air and false promises.
It was the same nasty nurse from the first day. She took my temperature, then told me to stand up and follow her.
“Where are we going?” I asked weakly.
She turned her nose up at me. I didn’t blame her. I probably smelled terrible. I hadn’t washed or changed clothes in weeks. “To bathe you,” she said. “Thank god,” she added under her breath.
She led me into the brightly-lit hallway and pulled me along to the end. It terminated in a set of stairs and an elevator. She put a keycard in a slot near the elevator, and it pinged a second later. The chrome doors slid open.
“Get in,” she said, motioning one hand toward them.
We rode the elevator up one floor according to the control panel inside. From the panel, I could see there were four floors altogether.
We stepped out into another hallway. This one was much airier and nicer than the other. It had high ceilings with intricate plaster moldings, oil paintings on the walls, polished parquet flooring and soft natural light. There was a slight scent of salty air in here too. It was pleasant and soothing, and it reminded me of my old summer job back in high school, working at a kiosk down at the beach.
I found myself wondering again if my cell was underground. So far, there’d been quite a lot of evidence pointing to that—the constant warmth despite a lack of heating devices, the harsh, unnatural lighting, and the winding secret tunnel which led steeply upward only to terminate in a ground-level door and window.
As I stepped down the new hall, I craned my neck to look out a window. I couldn’t make out much other than wide swathes of deep green pine trees. Wherever we were, we must be near a forest as well as the coast.
The nurse stopped outside a door and swiped her keycard in it again. She pushed it open and beckoned me in.
I let out a gasp at the sight inside. In the center of this new room was an enormous Roman-style bath, unlike anything I’d seen in person before. I was struck dumb by the imposing sandstone columns all around the square pool, each one linked by an embellished archway. The ceiling was inlaid with gold and the bathwater was made azure-blue by patterned tiles and underwater lights.
It was a shame a beautiful building like this housed such ugly secrets.
“Strip and get in,” the nurse said.
I was about to do what she said when the door opened. Instinctively, I turned my head, and I gulped as I saw Elias step into the room.
“I said strip and get in,” the nurse repeated.
I glowered at her. I didn’t particularly like the idea of being naked in front of her, but there was absolutely no way I wanted to be naked in front of Elias.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said. The nurse bowed her head and left the room. He turned his cold gaze to me. “You heard her, Tatum. Strip and get in.”
The expression on his face told me he wasn’t messing around, and the way he said my name made it sound like a threat. Do as I say or else.
Haltingly, I pulled off the filthy sweatshirt and pants I’d woken up in on my first day here. I hadn’t been given any underwear, so as soon as the clothes were crumpled around my feet, I was completely bare before him, dirty and humiliated. So far below him I may as well be a peasant from the Dark Ages.
This is the fucking Dark Ages, a sarcastic voice in the back of my mind whispered. All these men thinking they can buy and sell women like property. Archaic pricks.
Elias’s eyes roamed over the curves of my body. I shivered under his cold gaze. He was hard. I could see the thick outline of his cock straining against his black pants. I hoped I never had to see it bare, never had to feel it inside me. As astoundingly handsome as he was, he was pure evil, just like his father.
He took three steps toward me, slow and measured, his eyes never leaving my dirty body. Every inch of me was on display for him, and his lips curled into a devious smirk as my nipples hardened. It was only because I was cold. Not because of him.
Never because of him.
“Get in the water,” he said, tilting his head forward to indicate the enormous bath behind me.
I did as he said, feeling his watchful gaze on my back the entire time. The water was warm as I stepped down into it, but I kept shivering anyway. I heard slow footsteps behind me, and when I turned, I saw Elias standing right at the edge.
“Wash yourself,” he commanded. One hand flicked upward, motioning toward some bottles and a cloth on the edge toward my left.
I moved through the water and grabbed the first bottle I saw, a violet-scented shower gel. Tipping some onto the cloth, I scrubb
ed myself with it until my skin felt raw. Then I washed my hair with the shampoo and conditioner which sat next to the gel.
“Good girl. Already doing as you’re told,” Elias said a moment later, watching me with amusement as I lathered up my long brown hair. “I guess all those days in solitary broke you down just enough, huh?”
I swept my hand through the water, splashing his shoes and pants. “I’m only doing this because I haven’t been allowed to bathe until now, and I need to. Not because you told me to do it!”
His eyes went steely and dark, like slate in the rain. “You better watch your attitude if you want to stay in one piece. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”
“Bite me,” I muttered.
“I heard that. Next time you speak, I will fucking bite you, right on your pretty little clit. Maybe then you’ll learn your place.”
What did he think he was, a fucking vampire? Asshole.
I glared at him for a few more seconds. Then I fell silent and continued washing myself, basking in the warm water and sweet-smelling soaps. A few weeks ago, a bath or shower seemed like nothing to me; just an everyday ritual that everyone had to go through. Now it was a special treat to be savored, an indulgent luxury.
Elias finally looked at his watch. “Time to get out,” he said. He strode over to the other side of the room and returned with a fluffy white towel and matching bathrobe.
Against my better judgment, I let him dry me. Let his warm hands coast all over me with the towel, just so I could feel that human touch I’d been craving so badly. I’d promised myself I would never crave it from him, but by now I’d turned so loopy and desperate that I didn’t mind so much. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was somewhere else and the man rubbing me down was a beloved boyfriend, not a ruthless psychopath.
My eyes snapped open a moment later as Elias let out a chuckle. “I see the bath isn’t the only thing that got you wet,” he said, eyes focused downward.
I swallowed hard. I hadn’t even noticed until now, because I was too caught up in my own deep thoughts, but he was right. I was wet. Soaking wet and turned on beyond belief.