I remembered staring into the dark once all the energy had left me, staring and staring until my racing, terrified thoughts had turned sluggish--staring until the burning scrapes on my wrists felt numb to me.

I'd stared and stared until, I think, I had fallen asleep.

Sleep wasn't a refuge in the place I was trapped in--in the basement, cellar, room I was locked in. Instead, it carried broken bits of vivid nightmares with it, ones that felt too real, like maybe I was watching it all unfold before me on a screen. The voices alone were too real amidst the drugged haze I was in.

Drugged.

I could hear voices in my mind--in my ears. A loop on an agonizing repeat.

"We can be quiet, can't we?" That voice--too close, too muffled. "I know you can be. And I'll be very, very quick."

It was Michael and I in a restaurant--the restroom--all alone. I knew the name of the restaurant but I couldn't, for the life of me, remember it. It was me being forcefully trapped against one wall, it was Michael roughly shoving his hand over my mouth, pressing and pressing until even the image of me couldn't breathe.

"Get off! G-Get off me!"

I was there, but I wasn't. I could see me, I could feel sharp, visceral panic coiling tight in my chest, like it was happening to me all over again, but there was this sort of...detachment. Like the nightmare that had its claws in me was just a tape on repeat.

Pause. Rewind. Repeat. Again.

It was...it wasn't a nightmare. It was real. It was being--

I gasped out loud, air rushing into my lungs too fast and too cold, burning on its way down. Something was wrongwrongwrong--

A gloved hand seized my throat, shoving me back against the wall, holding me still in place. I tried to move, choking on the thin air, but my movements were too sluggish--slow--uncoordinated. I blinked, a noise escaping me, but I wasn't sure if it came from within me or the Alice in front of me--trapped under Michael's punishing hold--on the screen.

"Look." A punishing voice in my ears, speaking to me, taunting me. "Look at the things you did."

The screen. It was a videotape of me?

"W-What--"

Something pinched against my neck, sharp and quick and I wanted to wince but my throat was still being held tight under the unforgiving grip, and the panic was too slow but burning within me. I...didn't know what was happening.

"You see it now?" The voice was too close. Maybe it was in my head. Something pressing against the skin of my throat, injecting into me. "The wrong that you did? Do you know now that you must be cleansed?"

I looked, eyelids fluttering, the image of me being roughly shoved against the restroom wall burning right through me. It was the slowest of tortures.

"Do you see it now?" Santiago whispered in my ear.

I think I nodded. I was too out of it to not agree with him.

•••••

The next time I gained consciousness, I was dry heaving onto the floor. My stomach was in knots--in pain--burning in agony. There was the jagged edge of a glass--a knife piercing my skin--again and again and again until all I could feel was the pain and all I could think about was the pain. And there were screams, but they were trapped inside of me, begging to be let free.

Ryder, I remembered whispering in the midst of it--hopeless pleas in my mind. Ryder, Ryder, Ryder.

Querida, I heard him. I felt him. But he wasn't here. I wanted him to save me but maybe this time he wouldn't.

"Stop calling for him. You know he's not coming." Santiago's voice broke through my muddled awareness. The grogginess tried to keep the pain at bay, but now all I could think about was Ryder and the nausea and panic were trying to choke me.

"R-Ryder." I didn't understand why I kept saying his name, why I kept tainting his name with the awful pain corroding my mind.

There was a flickering torchlight at some distance from us. I felt the rattling breath inside my lungs, felt the drag of my skin--my shirt against the ground as I tried to get up. Santiago stood by the light, examining the glistening object in his hand. It was a shard of glass covered in something wet--blood or water or chemicals. I couldn't see past the burning tears.

I felt...lost.

I tugged on my hands with energy that felt depleted, the chains rattled, and another--maybe the last--guttural sob left me.

I didn't know what day it was, what time it was. I didn't know how much of it I'd lost.

"Do you know." He only murmured, yet his voice was the loudest in my ears, and faced me, blocking half of the light from my view. "I have seen what his father used to do to him. To your Ryder. It was this sort of...detached curiosity on his face when he used to ask his men to beat up his own son."

"No." The word felt unfinished, dry when it left my lips. How many times would I have to beg?

"He would think of new ways every single time." He added, watching me all the while, like he knew it too well that telling me all of this was equivalent to stabbing me in the chest. "I remember..."

"P-Please." I was shaking my head. Again and again and again. "Please, please, please."

I couldn't scream. My lungs wouldn't expand. My breaths were short and hollow--too fast and panicked. I can't escape this, I wanted to scream. I won't, I won't, I won't.

"He had whips made of hot, burning leather. Do you know the ringing silence it creates when it strikes bare skin? The hiss when smoke meets skin?"

My hands were clammy and aching, weak as I tried pressing them against my ears, as I tried to shut it all out, as I tried to muffle the sound of it all with the sobs that shook my whole frame. But still, Santiago's voice was just there.

"There's this innocence in a child that's just...snatched and ripped and burned to ashes when he's told to kill at the ripe age of ten." He mused. "By his own father, did I say?"

I curled into myself, tugging on the chains because at least that pain was better than the one piercing my chest--twisting my lungs into a cage I couldn't breathe past.

"I was his father's rightwing, you know." He continued. "I saw it all happen right before me. Do you know, he was never allowed to fight back? That the lashes on his back were the least of his punishments? That once, he almost died, the very first time he stood up to his father?"

No, I kept repeating the useless word in my head. No, no, no.

"I know that, Alice, because I was the one who dragged out his body when his father was done with him. He didn't wake up for days. And when he did, the cycle repeated."

"Stop!" I screamed out, because I couldn't breathe--because this place was hell--because I understood it now, that I wouldn't be able to take any more of this, that it would kill me, and isn't that what he wanted?

For me to die?

There was a laugh--as jagged as the shard of glass in his hand.

"I don't understand how he managed to get away from under his father's hold." Santiago kept talking. "Dacio always got what he wanted. Always knew where to hit, where it would ruin you the easiest."

I managed to get it out past my trembling lips, "He's...H-He will kill you."

"I know." And he said it like he truly believed in it--like his own life wasn't a matter of care to him at all. "I know Dacio, his father, has sent him after me. To put a stop to me."

I blinked past the tears, staring at him. His face remained emotionless under the torchlight.

"Why," I whispered, cradling my hands to my chest. Afraid, so afraid. "Why are you doing this?"

His stare was a knife on its own, staring right through me, gauging my ugly insides and letting them stay flayed open. I wanted to close my eyes shut until all of it disappeared forever.

I can't do this, I knew by now. I couldn't. The vivid images in my mind. The pain that wouldn't stop.

"Do you know what it's like, Alice." He started, the barest hints of an emotion in his voice. For the first time, I could hear something other than manic rage or the stilted blankness of his voice. It scared me. "Do you know what it is like to get betrayed by someone you would die for?"

He was gripping the shard of glass too hard. I watched as blood pooled in his hand, past his fist, and dripped down onto the floor. The way he just stared down at it, transfixed.

"It is the worst feeling known to mankind." He told me, eyes now boring into me. "It leaves you angry, it leaves you a gaping wound that never heals. Time doesn't heal. Time only makes you want to fixate on revenge. And I think no revenge is better than death, especially when it's carried out by the perpetrator's own hands."

A cold trickle dripped down my side, blood sticking to my own stomach. I curled around my knees.

"She loved me," he told me, then nodded as if emphasizing. "I know she did. I just don't know why she felt the need to turn against me."

Who, I wanted to ask. But my mind was battered and my voice didn't know how to question it anymore.

There was a clatter on the floor, the glass being tossed aside. He moved away from the torchlight and my heart started thudding again--loud and frantic and terrified. Terrified of what would happen next if he stepped close to me again.

"What...what happened to her?" It was my voice but it didn't feel like my own. I could feel myself slipping away. I didn't know if it was for my own good.

He snatched up the torchlight and waved it around. "I killed her, of course."

I stared at the glass shard covered in blood. Mine and his. The one he'd tossed away on the ground. It was too far away. How would I even escape with it?

"So you see, that's the only redemption people like her can get. People like you." He aimed the torch at me. I shuddered. "A liar. A betrayer. I will carve it into you until the only thing you believe in is that. Until you realize the only way out is through erasing your entire fucking existence."

I pressed my mouth against the stale cloth of my sweatpants. Dirtied and muddied and I didn't know how long I'd been here. How long I had left.

"Your Ryder won't be able to save you this time." He grunted, shoving the shard of glass with his foot until it scattered too far away from me, across the room--the cellar--the dungeon I was trapped in. "Do you want to know why?"

No, I wanted to say. But hearing that word again and again from my lips and inside my head was making me want to throw up. I didn't have anything left in my stomach to throw up.

"His father's here now," he said. "Who's going to save your Ryder from him?"