The Fall of V Read online

  But met empty air.

  My captor was no longer standing before me.

  It wasn't until I felt the weight and the click that I realized he had ducked down low by my legs.

  And shackled me.

  That was the metal sound.

  Chains pulled against the floor.

  My leg kicked out on impulse, like it could dislodge it.

  But there was no way.

  This was something heavy, something that weighed as much as my full leg likely did, making it hard even for it to lift off the floor.

  There was a creaking sound as my captor got back to his feet.

  I remembered maybe at the last possible second to curl my fist and strike out, to show that I wasn't cowed by a shackle, that I still had fight left in me.

  My knuckles met the firm, yet soft, flesh of an upper arm, having no impact at all except to incite the man who curled backward, and finally gave me what I had admittedly earned with my own violence, a strike to the jaw.

  The pain started at impact then ricocheted outward until the entire side of my face was throbbing, until the pain was deep in my jaw and gums but also my nose, my eye socket, my temple.

  I fell back against the wall for support as my hand rose, pressing into the pain as though there was any chance of easing it.

  My eyes closed.

  My breath hitched.

  Hitched.

  Like I was going to cry.

  But no.

  No crying.

  I wouldn't give him that, no matter how much my body was begging for the release.

  I took fast, strobe-like breaths, frantic and panic-laden.

  I could feel his gaze on me, his eyes clearly better adept at night vision than my own, the impact of it slimy and penetrating.

  But short.

  Short because he turned and I heard the clomp of his boots across the floor. Then up the stairs.

  There was a pause as he met the landing, then a light blared to life above me, making the migraine roar back to life, my body shrinking away from the brightness I could see even behind my closed lids as I fought back another wave of nausea.

  I didn't have time for pain.

  But my body didn't want to listen to reason, to my primal need for self-preservation.

  My body folded, my back sliding down the wall until I was squatting at knee-level, my elbows braced on my thighs, hands cradling my head.

  I can't say how long I stayed there.

  Pain had a way of warping time, bending it in a way that made it impossible to tell one pain-soaked moment from the next.

  But when the screaming inside my brain eased to a level that allowed me to think past it again, my thigh muscles were burning, my legs shaking with the effort to hold my weight in an unnatural position for it.

  I let myself slide down the wall fully, my butt hitting the hard, cold ground, my legs kicking out, one slower than the other, dragging the weight of the chain with it.

  That was the first thing I saw with the newfound harsh, fluorescent overhead light - the shackle, the giant metal ring encompassing my bare ankle, flecks of rust moving from it onto my skin. It would rub me raw, I knew, in just a few hours' time, making me sorely sorry that I had changed out of my school clothes and into this godforsaken outfit.

  A silly, frivolous, immature thing, I realized as I sat there, wanting to have a sweet sixteen, wanting it enough to disobey my parents, to take risks, to allow myself to be captured.

  I was victim-blaming myself, but, really, I should have known better. I should have realized that my father - of all people - was not the sort to overreact. If he felt I needed to be at school with armed guards, then at Hailstorm with an army of them, then that was exactly what was needed.

  I had been selfish and stupid to assume otherwise, to take it personally, to immaturely think that he was just trying to metaphorically rain on my parade.

  And here I was, paying for that ignorance.

  In a basement.

  How cliche.

  I mean, of course it was a basement. Of course it was a cliche. Those existed for a reason. Because what better place to keep women chained up but in a basement, ten feet under ground, behind thick, impossible-to-escape concrete, with no one to see them or hear them scream?

  I let out a shaky breath, pushing thoughts like those away, knowing they would do nothing but fuel the panic that was lying in wait, a tiger ready to pounce.

  My gaze slowly lifted, ignoring my bare legs, the short hem of my skirt, the easy access it provided for hands - and other body parts - that wanted to do a different kind of damage to me.

  No.

  I couldn't think about that either.

  The floor beneath my body was smooth in texture, marred with splatters. My gut twisted with the idea of blood, but they weren't the reds of fresh blood or even the brownish stains of dried. They were greens and tans and cobalt blues - paint.

  Almost directly across from me was the staircase, long and narrow as it had felt descending in the dark, a railing holding on by one struggling screw, half hanging out of the wooden beam it was connected to.

  The door at the top was wooden but maybe deceptive, maybe one of the security doors like Daddy had on all the outside entrances to our home, with metal bars inside.

  Finished with that, with the impossibility of reaching them thanks to a chain that implied I maybe had ten feet of freedom. Not enough to get to the bottom, let alone ascend. My eyes drifted to the right, finding the source of the breathing I had heard before.

  A woman.

  Not like me.

  Older.

  Older by at least a decade and a half. Thirty, maybe, with the slight creases beside her green eyes to attest to the years I had yet to experience. Her brown hair was long and stringy, a mess of grease and knots around her wide shoulders, ends falling to toy with her round breasts, unconfined by a bra, nipples peaking out of the thin off-white material of her shirt, objecting to the cold of being below ground. Her face was angular, a cat's face, with eyes not nearly as keen. Unnaturally subdued actually. Drugged, maybe. It would explain the blank look to her face, the way her body slumped back against the wall, legs cocked out at a painful angle. Pain she wouldn't feel if there was something coursing through her veins to prevent it.

  Her body was unmarked, though, not like mine, not bleeding and bruised and aching.

  Her head lolled to the side, unobstructed by working muscles, making my belly feel wobbly all over again, cringing at the idea of that being my fate, an animated corpse, a body to torment while the mind went elsewhere.

  I looked away, uncomfortable, the way a dying creature makes you feel wrong for watching it wither away, like it deserves the dignity of at least not being seen crossing over.

  I didn't expect anyone else.

  When my gaze went to the other end of the room, I expected emptiness, or useless things - old milk crates or boxes, musty forgotten belongings.

  But me and the dead-girl-sitting were not alone.

  This girl was younger though.

  My age.

  Faces like hers were deceptive, though, all soft and fleshy, one that said she would be carded well into her forties. Maybe she was sixteen, maybe nineteen.

  But either way, pretty.

  So pretty that, even in this ugly situation, I could still feel a twinge of jealousy at her shoulder-length blonde hair that was natural if her brows and lashes were anything to go by. Her lips were oversized, pouting almost, naturally so, by design, not choice, and the kind of pink that made you think lipstick, but judging by her greasy roots, I figured that was just their natural hue.

  The eyes, framed with thick dark blonde lashes were a startling shade of blue.

  And they were looking at me, watching me as I inspected her, as I looked over her like a judge to a dog seeking their AKC title.

  Blank.

  But not drugged, not unseeing, just not emoting.

  Unreadable.

  Her eyes didn't roam over me
, didn't compare my straight-up-and-down body to her perfectly curved one, didn't notice my clean hair as I noticed her dirty, didn't take in the injuries to my body as I did hers.

  The edge of her lip was scabbed over, a gash an inch long, a split that had to have been caused by a cruel hand. There was a band of blue around her throat, purple at the edges, rounded like fingers.

  Choked.

  Someone had choked her.

  There were spots on her white top, too, dried blood drops around the deep U of her neckline, the material saggy and weak like it had been stretched to that shape, as though it had been forced wide to allow...

  No.

  I swallowed hard as I watched her watching me.

  "Do you know where we are?" I heard my voice ask, quiet compared to my usual tone, but it rang out shrill and startling in the silent space, making the girl on the other side gurgle on her spit as this one jerked her head back slightly at the sound. "How long have you been here?" I added as she said nothing, just kept looking at me. "Are you chained too?" I tried, unable to see her legs as they were under her, cocked to the side.

  The drugged girl had chains.

  Though she didn't need them.

  Her mind was its own prison.

  Her body was useless even if the idea of escape did surface.

  "Shackle?" I repeated, jiggling my leg to make mine dance and jangle, wondering if maybe she didn't speak English.

  Whether she understood the words or the movement, I didn't know, but her body shifted, her butt meeting the floor, her legs sliding out to her side, one chained to the wall just like mine.

  "Did you try to run?" I asked, wondering if that was why we were chained. Had my fight - or hers - ensured our helplessness?

  She gave no answer to that, just let her head fall back against the wall, as though her neck were too weak to hold it any longer.

  "How long have you been here?" I tried again, unable to accept that I was in a room with two bodies, and neither of them could help me, could give me a better view of our prison, could show me where the weak spots were, so I could exploit them.

  There was nothing still for another several long minutes, just the tick of my heart, the rush of my blood, the throb in my jaw and temples.

  Then, "What's the date?"

  Her voice sounded weak and scratchy, awkward with disuse.

  I guess it should be, with no one to talk to but a drugged woman who - even if she did hear you - did not understand.

  "August third," I heard myself answer. Adding silently My birthday. Though, I was somehow acutely aware that even if I survived this, if I got free, August third would never again be the anniversary of my birth; it would always be the day I was taken.

  "Four months," she declared after a long moment, making my heart drop down into the acidic pits of my stomach.

  Her voice hitched then, making me snap out of the selfish turn of my thoughts, ideas of what four months would feel like to me, thoughts that were an actuality for her.

  Maybe it would have been better for her not to know, not to realize how long she had been suffering, how many things she had been missing in her old life, how her family had been worrying, how her friends had been missing her.

  My gaze snapped to her face, finding her eyes closed tight as she took another breath, this one forced and deliberate, slow, steadying.

  Her eyes opened again when the tension left her shoulders, when she seemed to get control over her emotions once more, leaving that awful blank look in her eyes again.

  "Do you have a name?" I asked, rolling my eyes at myself. Of course she had a name. Everyone had a name.

  "Chris," she told me, there being an inflection at the end, like a question, like she wasn't even sure anymore.

  "I'm Ferryn," I told her even though she hadn't asked, somehow needing her to know. Maybe a part of me wanted her to have that, in case something happened to me, in case she got free after, she could tell someone. My life - or death - wouldn't be a mystery. My family could stop looking.

  "Do you know where we are?" I asked again, now that she seemed willing to speak.

  "No. I was in a trunk," she admitted.

  "Me too," I agreed. "And the house was dark when I was brought in."

  "The light won't help you figure it out," she assured me.

  From knowledge.

  Because as long as she had been here, she still had the fight left in her to look for answers, to look for outs.

  "Is it just the two? The giant and the guy with a limp?"

  "No."

  The answer was clipped, and final, letting me know that I would not get more from her.

  In fact, she turned away, and let her blank stare study the wall across from her.

  I tried again a few moments later, badgering her with all the questions crowding for space in my mind, fighting for attention, for impossible answers.

  Impossible because Chris wasn't here anymore.

  I mean, she was, but she wasn't.

  She had slipped away.

  Inside her mind.

  Or out of it.

  I wasn't sure.

  But I imagined the escape made sense. It helped the hours pass. It let her release the physical hold on the world. Maybe she was back home. Maybe she was giving her mom a hug, kissing her little sister. Maybe she was making out with a boy behind the movie theater, or dancing her heart out in ballet class.

  Wherever she was, I hoped it was better than here.

  With the cold, hard floors we were meant to sit and sleep on. With the moisture that seeped in through the dirt and cement, chilling us to the bone. With the small toilet in the center of the room where we were expected to go with the others able to see and hear.

  Dignity.

  That was something I was going to have to force myself to let go of.

  There would be none to find here as I tried to sort out a path to freedom.

  I would have to eat to stay strong and focused. If I ate, I'd have to use the bathroom. And if I was stuck here for months like Chris, well, there were other undignified bodily things to consider.

  My belly twisted at that thought, and it took me a good twenty minutes - I'm guessing of course, but figured it felt something like twenty minutes, though it could have been five or three weeks for all I knew - that there was no cause for shame, no reason to feel embarrassed over my body and how it worked. If they wanted to strip us of everything - including basic human necessities - well, then they could become aware of how our insides came outside every four weeks, and all the raw and ugly that meant.

  Raw and ugly, after all, was what they seemed to like best.

  What was more raw or ugly than girls chained in basements, unknowing their fate, forced to accept it whatever it was?

  Except, well, maybe they hadn't counted on me.

  Maybe they counted on drugged-out girls made malleable, or girls who escaped their minds and bodies like Chris.

  They didn't factor in girls like me, born into worlds of uncertainty and violence, raised up to stand against it, to fight it, to overcome it.

  And make no mistake, that was what I was going to do.

  Stand against it.

  Fight it.

  Overcome it.

  Come hell or, as my father might say, motherfucking high water.

  FOUR

  Summer

  V had my daughter.

  I could say My mother has my daughter, but that made it sound like they were having tea, and homemade cookies fresh out of the oven, chocolate still gooey - as gooey as the feeling as that scene conjures up.

  But I doubted my mother knew anything at all about cookies and ovens.

  What she did know about, though, was basements, and chains, and pain, and degradation.

  I had a brand on my thigh and scars down my back to prove it.

  And now she, and worse yet - her minions - had my daughter.

  It's too early to know that, that was what Lo had said when the news came in.

  Sure,
abductions happened every day. To countless young girls all over the world.

  But this, this was too perfect.

  She had been under full-time guards for months, never out of sight of at least two people with guns, and the skills to use them effectively.

  And the one time she sneaks out, some random slimeball grabs her? No. That was too coincidental.

  I knew that.

  Reign knew that.

  Even Lo knew that.

  They were probably just trying to keep my mind from going there.

  But how couldn't it?

  Even all these years later, my mind went there at times. When I was sleeping, when my subconscious decided I had been too happy for too long, that I needed a reminder of what all this was born in.

  Fear and misery and a chance escape.

  From the torture.

  And the humiliation.

  I paced the smooth, flawless floors in an empty hall of Hailstorm, the windowless darkness only interrupted by a small hanging bulb from the ceiling, creating ghosts in corners, much like the ones I felt in the recesses of my mind.

  Ghosts with clanking bones and cold breath and wicked sneers.

  Because Ferryn, much like me all those years ago, would be scared and alone and confused, unsure what might happen to her, why this was happening to her, what chance there was for survival, let alone escape.

  "Ugh," I growled, just barely containing the urge to slam my foot into the wall, knowing how unbending it would be, and that now was not the time to drag any of Lo's people away from trying to find my daughter to put a cast on my broken foot.

  I deserved it, though, the broken foot.

  I should have listened to them.

  Lo and Janie and Maze and Mina, when they had sat me down like some kind of intervention just a few weeks ago, faces grim, voices firm, telling me that it was time.

  Time to tell Ferryn about V.

  Time to tell her about what had happened to me.

  "She's seen the scars by now," Lo had reasoned. "Don't you think you are doing her more of a disservice by keeping the truth from her? She's not a little girl anymore."

  But she was.

  In so many ways, she was.

  Innocent and ignorant of the depth of evil ran in our blood.

  Because that was what V was.