Chained - Zara Novak Page 0,44

if he was a monster. Maybe I was just as bad as him. Maybe I really did need him.

With each fall into my ever-deepening degeneracy I found myself losing sight of Rachel. Maybe she had been the mask all along. What if slave was the real me?

Nothing else in my life had ever felt this real before.

Looking up I saw another crack of light around the boarded-up windows. Time meant nothing anymore, not now that I was a prisoner in a cage.

You can still escape, a voice in my head said. There is a still way out of here.

I don’t know why that crack of daylight brought back my old voice. Some part of me was still hanging on. Some part of me still wanted to fight. Could I really leave him now, even if I wanted to? Could I deceive him, could I betray him all over again?

“Holy fuck, Rachel,” I said to myself. “Just listen to yourself. You’re starting to sound like you want to be here.”

I was starting to feel like there were two parts of me now. Rachel still wanted to get out. Slave wanted to stay. She wanted to let go of everything and fall in love with the bastard that called himself her master.

“Get a grip, girl,” I said to myself again. “One thing is straight. You’re losing your fucking mind.”

I took another sip of water from the jug and brought it back to the bed with me, my chain rattling over the stone as I walked. I sat down and tore into the box of snacks. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since I had arrived here, and my stomach was growling.

I wolfed down every last bit of food and still felt hungry. A quick glance at the tablet let me see that there were several more options now. I flicked through the rest of the pages and saw all sorts of items that could be earned by ‘being a good girl.’ If I worked hard and long enough, I could turn this into a regular room. There was even an option to get the windows back.

Three days. For the next three days I was chained here, an animal in filth. A degenerate slave waiting at the beck and call of a sexual psychopath. I couldn’t touch myself. I couldn’t relieve the constant torment he was inflicting upon me, or the time would just be extended.

Three days?

I had done twenty years under my parents and their batshit insane rules. Three days was a walk in the park.

I curled up in bed and threw the sheet over myself, the chain rattling dully over the stone at the foot of the bed. I fell asleep some point after that, a slave in the darkness, a girl forgotten by the world. Prisoned. Punished. Used.

Chained.

Chapter 6

Rachel

Over the next three days my punishment became clockwork. The crack around the boarded-up windows was my only telltale sign to whether it was night or day in the real world. When the light was out, I knew not to expect Vincent. When darkness came, I knew it was only a matter of time before he came to me.

Servants came at regular intervals to bring food or change the torch by the door. The meals were always hot, and I practically inhaled the first one. It was in a foil tray, but I could tell it had been cooked on site. Some sort of beef curry with potatoes and fresh naan bread. It was delicious.

The option for a ‘book’ on the tablet stipulated a servant was to take me to the library and help me pick something, but as I was currently chained in the cell as a punishment that didn’t work out. It was Tasha who came, she was the one that checked on me most of the time.

“You cannot come to the library,” she said. “But I can bring you back something.”

“Anything,” I said. I needed something to stop me going mad. When Vincent wasn’t here it was easy to get wrapped up in my own thoughts. “Just make sure it’s big. It needs to last.”

She came back with The Count of Monte Cristo, which made me laugh. As books went it was certainly one of the longer ones. I had already read it before—it had been one of my guilty pleasures with my duplicate library card—but I didn’t mind reading it again, it was one of my favorite books.

In a way the book seemed quite fitting. It was about