Dark Matter Read online

  Oh well. Thinking about that happy face on my timeline made the nausea melt away. Either that or I just waited it out long enough for it to disappear on its own.

  I felt to my right, where the window was, where the tiny sliver of light was cutting through the darkness in this room. I inched my fingertips along and came across a piece of wood that must have been nailed to the wall. It felt like plywood. A little splinter lodged itself in the flesh of my pinky. I made a face and slid the palm of my foot across the floor, inch by inch, moving to the side about a foot altogether. The rocks were biting my feet.

  I moved over until the plywood was directly in front of me. I had to stand on my tippy toes to look out the crack. Placing my fingers on the rough upper edge, I used them to pull up and peer out. I immediately squinted. My pupils constricted so fast it was physically painful.

  Everything was blindingly white, and I mean everything. White ground, white sky, white trees. I couldn’t see very far into the distance because snow was coming down like it was the end of days. Had snow even been in the forecast? We rarely got that much precipitation in Black Creek, North Carolina. Our winters were generally filled with occasional freezing rain and snowfall that lasted no more than five minutes. Just the mere mention of it would send the locals to the grocery stores in a panic, where they would proceed to buy out all the bread and milk. This here was North Carolina mountain-level snow.

  I fell back down on the flat of my feet and let my forehead bump into the wood. A jagged spike pierced my flesh, and I swore under my breath. I then placed my hands on the upper edge and pulled down as hard as I could, over and over until my palms burned. But I wasn’t strong enough to make it budge an inch.

  I suddenly became cognizant of the fact that my captor was probably on the other side of these walls. He could be listening to me, waiting to make his next move. To do what, I wasn’t sure. He had plenty of opportunity to do whatever he wanted while I was lying here unconscious. For all I knew, he could have removed a kidney and sold it on the black market. But my stomach wasn’t sore, so that was out. I quickly ran my hand along my abdomen, wondering if I would feel anything weird that shouldn’t be there. Oh God, what if I felt something that wasn’t supposed to be there?

  A super quick body inspection failed to turn up any clues, so I shook the dark thoughts away, forcing my mind to go back to the snow. I wondered if I was still in North Carolina or if he had taken me somewhere else, somewhere very far away from home. And then I wondered how far we could have traveled without me waking up.

  The last thing I remembered was the hand clamped over my mouth and nose, the rain, his wet skin, and passing out. Just the thought of it made sharp, acidic bile creep up my throat.

  We definitely couldn’t have gone far if I had only fainted from lack of air. But it was likely he drugged me, maybe with an injection. That would certainly have explained why my leg was sore. It would definitely explain the mental fog, the nausea, and the muscle fatigue. This could be a clue, if I knew someone who had access to injectables. It had to be someone I knew. This was no random act of unkindness.

  I walked the full circumference of the room, following the cement wall the entire way. As I traveled, I went through a mental checklist of any and all enemies I had made over the years. Let’s see. No one in my family had anything to do with me. My only friend had moved to Myrtle Beach to be with her boyfriend five years ago. We hardly ever spoke anymore. And we had never even gotten into so much as a quarrel. Her boyfriend tended to get a little flirty with me when I visited. But I hadn’t seen her in more than two years. Good God, I don’t even know why I was thinking about Helena. Okay, so family and friends were a big no. I mean, let’s face it. What kind of family member or friend would kidnap you anyway? Unless they were doing it as a joke.

  There were people at work who didn’t like me. No one said anything outright derogatory. But there had been whispers, snickers, rumors, the usual playground stuff. It didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t your average girl, and my co-workers picked up on that. I had issues. I knew this. But it wouldn’t have killed them to be nice to me for five minutes. They had no idea the demons I was battling. If they knew, maybe they would have been kinder. Then again, most people were assholes. They probably would have just used my demons against me.

  I made it back to the window, realizing I had gone all the way around this room without discovering a door handle. How the hell had I gotten in here?

  Just then, a loud clanging sound with the screeching of metal on metal snapped my attention behind me, and my head twisted in an exorcist-like move. Something was opening or sliding across the floor. A door or a lift, maybe. I spun around and pressed my back against the wall, my palms up against the cement. A draft of warm air breezed past me. I looked down, staring into the sea of darkness, trying to get a sense of which direction the warmth was coming from, as if maybe it would help me.

  My flesh puckered just as the metal-on-metal sound stopped. A loud bang hung in the air, its echo suspended somewhere between me and the silence.

  And then there were moans. I snapped my head to the side, honing in on where the sounds were coming from. Someone was in front of me. Just right there. Across the room. I wanted to cry, but I stood still and waited, holding my breath. My chest banged against my tank top.

  “Ssssshit.” A man’s voice. Some heavy breathing and grunting.

  I squatted, resting my buttocks on the heels of my feet and spreading my fingertips out on the broken tile floor, thinking I might have to crawl away at any second. Or at least scurry like a crab. Crawling and scurrying seemed like a better option than running. Because who runs in pitch-dark rooms? Not this girl.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, his voice gruff and exhausted.

  Wait. He wasn’t here to hurt me. He was hurt himself. I wasn’t alone, and that was slightly comforting. There was just one problem. If this man was hurt, what was in store for me?

  Chapter 3

  I was afraid to answer at first. So I remained silent.

  Were we alone or were there others? And how did he get in here? I didn’t hear any footsteps or the normal sounds of a door opening and closing. What was this place?

  I stayed hunched down. Adrenaline kept me on high alert and made my heart pound through several dozen skipped beats. My entire body was tense, sure that at any second, hands would yank me up and give me some of the same this guy had been subjected to.

  I finally gathered the courage to speak, but my voice was stuck. Not working. Out of service. Once the silence hung there for an uncomfortable length of time, it occurred to me that he could be dying. And that’s when I got really scared.

  “Hello?” It came out soft and unsure. Like I wanted to connect but I didn’t want him to hear me either. I waited for a reply. But only silence filled the air.

  “Hello,” I said louder this time.

  My voice scared me, echoing around the room in a circle, making a full sweep and coming back to me, as if it were a physical entity. A low grunt reverberated off the walls, and something scraped along the floor like chalk—a slow dragging from one end to the other that completely iced me all over.

  “Hey!” I called out, quickly shifting from defense to offense mode. Prickly sensations danced up my spine, and my primal responses went up. Honing in on where the noise was coming from, the muscles in my scalp tugged at my ears.

  “Who the fuck’s there?” he asked, sounding pissed. His frustration confused me. But who knows what he had been dealing with. He obviously felt threatened by something. Or someone.

  My leg started to cramp. The sore one. Screw this. “My name’s Lyric,” I answered, standing back up and crashing into the wall behind me. The concrete scratched my shoulder and I grimaced. Silence followed my name. “What are we doing here?”

  More groaning. “You’re not very bright, are you?”

  Well, that was debatable. Not like I went to Harvard or anything. But I took his insult to heart. My stomach tightened, and I wondered if I was missing something. He sounded like a victim, same as me, but I couldn’t trust him. He was a man, after all. I had no idea whose side he was on. He sure wasn’t winning any brownie points with me.

  Another clang echoed in the far distance. I wondered if someone else was due to arrive. Or if one of us would be taken away.

  My new cellmate mumbled something incoherent.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Are. You. Chained. Up?” he repeated, his voice halting after each word. Every syllable that left his mouth seemed to be hard work. “It’s okay. He’s gone,” he added.

  “He? Who is he? And no, I’m not chained up.” No chains on me. Did that make me lucky, or was it a sign of things to come?

  “I don’t know who he is,” the man garbled. “But I know when he comes and goes. You’ll get to learn the noises around here too.”

  Great. I couldn’t wait.

  “You sound like you’re hurt. Are you?” I darted my eyes back and forth, trying to make out a shadow or some movement. The total darkness was disorienting.

  “I’m hurting,” he answered. “But I’m not hurt.” It was a very strange answer, but I got his drift.

  The good news was I had a cellmate. A cellmate who could possibly give me answers. And if he was still alive, I had a good chance of surviving too. But he also sounded bad. And he was hurting. That definitely wasn’t a good sign.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Not sure exactly. Five days I think.”

  Of course. The dark. It was probably hard to tell. But five days? The way he had been talking, I would have guessed much longer than that. Still, five days was long enough to have picked up on something, like who our kidnapper was, among other things.

  “Why are we here?”

  He laughed. “Are you serious? Do you think the son of a bitch who brought us here wants us to know why? We’re here for his sick entertainment. We’re here because we’ve pissed him off. Does it really fucking matter anyway?”

  “Yes it matters,” I answered, making a face.

  Our kidnapper’s motivation most certainly mattered. It could mean the difference between life and death. Between escape and torture. Between… why the hell was this guy so pissed off at me? Sounds of shackles beating against the floor filled the air, and he let out an impatient grunt. My mouth started to water, and I felt sick to my stomach again. Jesus. He had already given up.

  I didn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t like him, didn’t like his whole vibe. Aside from the fact that he was a giant dick, he wasn’t being very optimistic. When faced with a crisis, I prefer to not be around people who are sure that death is imminent. I sat down on the floor and wrapped the bottom of my tank top around my knees, keeping warm as best I could.

  “Will you at least tell me your name?” I asked sometime later. I was curious. Maybe we knew each other. Even if we didn’t, he was all I had in this private hell.

  “Nolan. Yours?”

  He must not have heard me the first time. I repeated my name to him, speaking clearer this time.

  “Well Lyric, I would say nice to meet you, but it would be a lie.”

  “Right,” I answered. “Given the circumstances and all.”

  His chains jingled. “Fuck the circumstances. I just don’t like people.”

  Well, at least he was honest. I leaned my head against the wall and rubbed my face. I’m pretty sure I would have felt more oriented if I were standing on my head. I crossed my feet, rubbed them together, and pinched some gravel between my fingers, wondering if I could use it as a weapon if needed. I guess it could give a wicked skin abrasion.

  “I don’t like people either. Especially men.” My turn to tell the truth. And if he wanted to know why, I’d gladly tell him. But it didn’t look like we were going to become best buddies.

  “Well, gender makes no difference to me. I find people as a whole to be shallow and self-serving. Frankly, I think it’s time to release a wide-spread, mass-killing virus.”

  Wow. Strong stance to take. It would have been easy to agree with him, given my past. But I knew that plenty of people had good hearts and selfless agendas. I just didn’t know where they were. They were a rare species to me, like some elusive South American bird that, instead of flying, crawls along the ground at night. I had become convinced that good things and kindness were for other people.

  “Can’t argue with you there,” I said, keeping the peace. “Especially given our situation.”

  Silence mushroomed around us once again. His breathing sounded regular and shallow, indicating he was asleep. Before long, my eyes became led weights. And just as I started to drift off, I had the urge to pee. Damn. I shifted in place, the tiny pieces of gravel smushing into my skin. I couldn’t use the bathroom where I was. I had already claimed this little spot on the wall as my temporary home. Not that I liked it here and wanted to stay.

  I held it as long as I could. Once it felt like someone was pumping my bladder with their fist, I knew I would have to suck it up and find a place to pee.

  As I wandered to the corner, I visualized this room as a party lounge with a leather sofa and a wet bar. Maybe a clown making animals out of balloons. I was trying to lighten the mood. But it turned out to be a giant fail. The funny clown fantasy twisted into a nightmare of epic proportion as I imagined him morphing into John and holding a knife to my throat. And that’s when the dam broke and the memories came flooding back.

  The coldness of the steel sliced my skin, messing with my mind as he held the knife right up against the jugular. His favorite spot. I was wearing a blindfold, so I couldn’t see what he was doing. I could only hear, feel, assume, conjure up images in my head.

  Mindfuckery.

  It wasn’t the first time we had done this. But I was still unsure about how comfortable I was with it all. It felt wrong, like I was doing something wrong. And John was constantly reassuring me that it wasn’t.

  He said we were opposite sides of the same coin. And if he enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it, that no harm could come of it. He argued that no crime was being committed because it’s only a crime if you get caught, and what two adults consent to behind closed doors is none of the government’s concern. Well, I consented to it, and he was using safe techniques, so there was absolutely nothing to worry about. John had a way of simplifying things right down to a microscopic level.

  “Don’t you fucking move, cunt.” His breath hit my cheek, smelling like endive salad and Caesar dressing.

  What was it about smelling him? If he was close enough for me to take in his scent, then he was close enough to do some real damage, drain my emotional pipes. I needed that. My thoughts and my feelings, they were this thick, sticky, disease carrying fluid, running through long, tangled pipes inside of me. And only he was capable of purging the liquid from my body.

  “I won’t, Daddy.”

  His hand squeezed the cheeks of my face. Not as hard as before, but I should have known better than to talk without permission. It interrupted the feng shui of the moment.

  He tossed the knife aside—it had accomplished its mission as he would soon find out—and slid behind me. As I sat bound to the small, wooden chair, his hand tightened around my throat. My face began to throb as his other hand slipped underneath my panties.

  My body tensed the instant he touched me there. I had no self-control. His light strokes against my swollen bud made me dripping wet, but I wasn’t allowed to move. I had to remain perfectly still. It was agonizing, having to sit there without grinding against his hand. My stomach muscles tightened as the oxygen was cut off to my brain. I had to orgasm soon, or I would pass out.

  “Whore!” John spat in my face, and I finally came on his finger. Stars exploded in the darkness of my vision, and my entire body convulsed in torturous pleasure.

  Once he released his grip on my neck, my body felt warm all over. A single tear fell from my eye before the blindfold caught it. I wanted to get up from the chair, but I wouldn’t be released right away. We were only halfway finished. Now, I would wait for John to use me the way he wanted, either by shoving his cock in my mouth, up my ass, or he might let me off the hook and simply shoot his load on my face.

  A chill passed through me, but I didn’t want to expend the little bit of energy I had shivering, so I pictured the beach. Specifically, one of the last times I visited John at the coast. We lay out in the sun all day and I got fried. That’s what happens when you slather on so much tanning oil you look like a porn star. Throw a little rum in the mix and you’re as good as dead. My shoulders, legs, and face felt like a branding iron that night. I tried to conjure up that feeling again—my skin sizzling. It helped a little.

  I took several tentative steps forward, tapping my toes on the floor in front of me to be sure I didn’t step on something sharp. Shards of gravel scratched my feet, and I brushed them aside, swearing under my breath, knowing I might have to get used to this.

  I continued to move forward, using my toes like a broom to shove shit aside. By the time I reached the other wall, my feet were killing me from all the little rocks.

  “What are you doing?” Nolan asked.

  “Feeling my way around in the dark. Looking for a place to use the bathroom,” I answered in a low voice.

  He pulled in a breath, then paused. “You’re wasting your time. There’s one out there,” he continued. “But that won’t do you any good.”

  I gave him a look of shock on autopilot then corrected myself. “So let me get this straight. You’ve been here for five days, so you know the layout. What’s in here? And when will he turn on the lights?”

  He snorted a laugh. “I don’t know of his future lighting plans. And I don’t know the layout of this place. All I know is that I wandered around, just like you, my first day in camp hell. Believe me, there’s nothing but four crumbling walls, a floor, and I assume, a ceiling.”