dreams, but I was finding it harder to grasp them now. They’d forgotten me and I was losing my hold on me too.
I am hated.
I am nothing.
I am no one.
“Finish it,” I forced out in a challenge, my mind clearing just enough to hook on this one desperate desire. “I’ll never tell you anything, so just kill me already,” I ordered in a fierce tone that sounded nothing like that small boy. “Finish it!”
His warm hand rested on my flesh, moving from one wound to another until it flattened over my furiously beating heart.
“Oh no, pretty eyes,” he said in a low tone. “I won’t be doing that. Not yet. Do you know why?”
I grunted and he took that as a cue to keep talking.
“Because I may carve up your body on the outside, but in here is my goal.” He walked his fingers up my neck and to my temple. “And here. I’m gonna crawl into those cracks I see in you and you’ll never get me out. I know the taste of pain, Chase Cohen, and it ain’t the wounds on your flesh that cut the deepest. It’s the ones that creep between your veins and burrow into your skull to mark themselves there forever. I’m your infestation, the rats who’ve moved into the walls of your home, scratching and chewing and gnawing at the beams which hold your house up. And I’m here to stay.” His touch left me and I cracked open my good eye as he walked away, heading to the door and leaving me there on that hook as my shoulders ached and begged for relief.
He kicked the door shut with a bang and headed out of the basement, his footfalls thumping back upstairs.
I tried to get my foot on the chair just in front of me, my toes grazing it, but I couldn’t get purchase.
“Come on, you piece of shit,” I hissed.
I tried to swing myself toward it, but it hurt so fucking much that I had to stop and I hung my head, my hair falling into my eyes and my breaths coming unevenly.
The door sounded and my head snapped up in confusion as it swung slowly open. Shawn always locked it when he left, but I guessed this time he figured I wasn’t going anywhere so he hadn’t thought to do it. But as a slim, shadowy figure slipped into the space, my heart juddered and I wondered if I’d lost my mind completely. It looked like there was a room adjoining this one through that door and I caught a glimpse of an old rocking chair and a bed beyond it. Was I not the only prisoner down here?
She moved into the light of the single exposed bulb hanging from the ceiling and my brows pulled together at the wrinkled old woman standing there in a white blouse and navy skirt. Her hair was a shock of white and her skin was almost as pale, but I knew her. Her eyes were those of a long, lost friend, one I’d grieved, stood at the grave of.
“Miss Mabel?” I croaked in shock, blinking my working eye as I tried to clear this vision. She’d lived in the Rosewood Manor a long time ago when I’d been a kid. Me and the others had done odd jobs for her on the estate while she turned a blind eye to us sneaking onto her property and using her summerhouse. She’d been the one to give us the keys to the Rosewood crypt. She’d been the only adult in our youth who’d shown us true kindness.
“Chase Cohen,” she said in an ancient, croaky voice, her hands shaking as she moved closer and reached out to touch my arm.
“I thought you were dead,” I rasped, wondering if my body had given up and I was in the middle of crossing over or some shit, because this was a serious headfuck.
“My nephew has everyone fooled,” she said bitterly, then moved to the chair and dragged it closer so I could stand on it. As soon as I did, I lifted my hands off of the hook and sighed my relief as I lowered my arms, wincing as pain radiated through my entire torso.
Mabel started tutting, looking me over with a frown as she untied my hands and I untethered my ankles. “That Shawn boy is an evil fellow.”
I stepped down off of the chair and stared at this tiny woman who’d been so important to me