Circus of Death - Candace Wondrak Page 0,35

want to feel that type of pain.

Was all of this because I was with Trey? If I had my lips to use, I would’ve either tried to explain it to Nigel, or told him to screw off in very colorful language. As it stood now, all I could do was lay here and become the victim of this macabre magic trick gone wrong.

I was a person. I was a person with my own wants and desires, my own needs. I’d come from a life where no one really cared about what happened to me. My own family didn’t seem to care whether I existed or not half the time. Of course I wanted to make my own decisions, to choose what I wanted to do; the last thing I wanted was for someone else—cough, cough, Nigel—to make those decisions for me.

If he couldn’t understand that… then did I even matter to him? Did he simply want to own me while not giving two shits about me? That wasn’t what I wanted in this life. Ownership with no love was akin to slavery, mere bodily possession, the very opposite of a willing relationship, and I did not want to be that girl.

My stomach shuddered when I felt the pressure of the saw edge meeting the fabric of the dress. Nigel still cut away, not even looking at me, not caring about how fast my heart raced, how badly I wished I could get out of this trap. In a few moments, the saw had cut through the dress, and though I tried my best to suck in my stomach and keep it from that saw, it was impossible.

The saw met my flesh, cutting into it with each jerk of Nigel’s arm, back and forth, digging deeper. Blood oozed from the wound; I could feel it running down my sides as pain shot through me. I couldn’t cry out, couldn’t wince. My face was permanently stuck as it was. The only thing I could seem to do was blink.

Blink and take the pain with a creepy smile on my face, wordlessly accepting whatever fate Nigel decided to dole out to me.

I didn’t know how long it was before the saw cut through my flesh and made it to the organs nestled deep within my gut. It wasn’t a good feeling, to feel steel sliding through your intestines and severing anything it came in contact with, but I could not fight it. I could do nothing but lose myself in the pain.

And there was so much of it. So, so much of searing hot agony, every single nerve in my body screaming, my vision zoning in and out even though my heart pumped full of adrenaline. This was all useless. All pointless.

Why fight what I couldn’t change?

After a while, the world around me faded to black, and the last thing I wondered was if death had finally claimed me for good.

Unfortunately, death didn’t claim me. The only thing that claimed me was consciousness, for I jerked awake in bed, sweating even though my body was far from hot. I felt my stomach, glancing down to see I was still naked from my night with Trey.

Oh, thank God. It was just a dream. Just a creepy as all hell nightmare that wasn’t real.

Knowing it wasn’t real didn’t make me feel better, though, for as I rolled myself out of bed and threw on clothes, an uneasy feeling settled in my gut, a feeling that told me things might just end up worse than my dream. This was reality, as twisted as it was, and theoretically, Nigel could shove me in a box and cut me in half, just like he’d done in my dream. From how Nigel spoke, I’d wake up the next day as if it never happened, having received nothing but a world of pain and a temporary death.

A temporary death. Who knew that was a thing?

I left my tent, gazing all around, not seeing anyone immediately… the exact same thing that had happened in my dream, that had led me to end up at Nigel’s mercy. I hoped with all of my heart this would not end up being a redo of that nightmare.

Dreams must be an impossible thing here; the only visions gracing your sleep after you were dead were nightmares. Or maybe I was the only unlucky one.

This time, no invisible force took me over, nothing out of sight controlled me and made me walk. This time, it was