A muffled, wailing cry tears through the small house and my eyes widen in fear, desperately searching but not even close to finding where the noise came from.
“Put her with the others,” Giovanni says, his eyes filled with laughter as he strides past me and grabs a bottle of wine from the kitchen table. He walks back toward the door. “Call me if there are any changes,” he throws over his shoulder, sparing me one last haunting stare.
Giovanni disappears and I swallow hard, being left with the two guards as they jam their hands into my back and push me across the room. I stumble forward, barely catching myself against a locked door, and watching in horror as they pull me away and shove a key deep into the lock.
The door pulls open and all I see is darkness. The smell wafting in has me gagging, and as I’m pushed through, my foot steps down onto a rickety spiral staircase, much like the one in the tomb. My body trembles and I shake my head, pulling back, refusing to see what horrors they have down here, but they push me harder, forcing me to keep going.
Pained cries and curses come from deep below and fear rattles through my chest as my feet barely keep up with the guard’s hard pushes. We get halfway down and a small string is pulled above and a dim yellow light shines through the darkness, showcasing the horrors that Giovanni keeps hidden below.
The whole basement has been fitted out with old, dirty cells. There are broken and battered women all around me. Some weep while others just stare at their cell walls, wishing something would just come along and put them out of their misery.
“No,” I breathe, red-hot tears filling my eyes as I try to fight my way out. “NO.”
A hard slap cracks across my face and I whimper under the force as it knocks my head right to the side and I fall down the remaining stairs. Hands capture my arms and I’m yanked back to my feet before being tossed toward the hard cell. My face smashes up against the cold, metal bars as a man steps in behind me, keeping me pinned to the bar as the other guy unlocks the empty cell.
The door slides open, the metallic BANG echoing right through my chest, and before I get the chance to pull back and fight him off just as the boys taught me, I’m thrown hard through the opening of the cell. I fall forward, my body crashing against the dirty, damp ground as I hear someone across from me screaming in agony.
Panic tears at me and I spin around, flying to my feet just as the heavy metal bars slam closed, locking me in. I scream out, gripping onto the bars and pulling hard. “LET ME OUT,” I wail, shaking the bars as though I could somehow tear free. “PLEASE,” I sob. “LET ME OUT.”
“It’s no use,” a bland, exhausted voice comes from the cell beside me. “There’s no getting out of this one. You’ve doomed us all.”
My head whips around and I stare at the woman through the dim light, something familiar about her tone. My brows furrow and I move across my cell to get a better look and suck in a breath as I find Ariana, her body beaten and bloodied, the scars I left on her body nothing compared to what her husband has done to her.
I fall back a step, my back slamming up against the opposite wall as guilt weighs down on me. I did this to her.
Dropping to the ground, my knees crumble in the dirt as my face falls into my hands. I’m a fucking monster. What has this world turned me into? It’s one thing to want revenge on a woman who set me up for the worst torture of my life, but this isn’t what I wanted. She was supposed to have gotten away. She took off in the guard’s SUV and I came to terms with the fact that was the end. I was never going to have to see her again, never have to think back on what happened, but here she is, staring me in the face and blaming me for the fresh hell that she’s endured at her husband’s hands.
The same pained cry from earlier tears through the room and the labored breathing that comes with it has my head whipping around and searching through the thick bars. Seeing only a faint shadow in the darkness, I crawl across the ground, my knees screaming in protest until I finally see her, curled in on herself, whimpering in pain.
“Hey,” I call out, gripping onto the bars. “You’re going to be okay. Just hang in there, okay. The pain will go away soon.”