And when you don’t expect things to occur, like being attacked and kidnapped in your bedroom by your husband, it can be hard to believe that they have.
My brain wants to play woulda, coulda, shoulda—I would have been ready if I’d thought for a second he’d be waiting, I could have let Gunner walk me in, I should have let Ryder be late—but I can’t let it. I need to focus on will and can. And I need to do it fast. Because someone’s opening the door, and from the slow pace of the steps, I don’t think it’s anyone coming to rescue me.
“You’re awake, love,” Sebastian says, leaning over the edge of the tub, a plastic Rite Aid bag hanging from his wrist. “Wonderful.”
He wears a white dress shirt, buttoned all the way to the top. His black hair is combed, his silver cufflinks, the ones he bought himself for his birthday last year, are polished, his pants are pressed. Not a piece of him is out of place, as though this were any other night: come home from work, kidnap a woman, watch the news before bed.
He takes me by the shoulders and adjusts me to a sitting position facing him, my knees folded in front of me, my bound hands behind me. Looking at me, he examines my face, picks up a strand of my dark hair. I shiver as his finger grazes my ear. “So drab, this color,” he says. “And your face. So much prettier without makeup.”
I’m not wearing any makeup, you insane asshole, I think as he puts his hand under my chin, titling my head toward him. From the Rite Aid bag, he pulls out a box of hair dye—white lightning blond—and a packet of alcohol wipes.
“I’ll have you restored in no time,” he says. “Everything will be back to the way it was. The way it should be.”
He starts to clean my face, scrubbing under my eyes and over my nose, and I cringe at the harsh smell of the alcohol but he only scrubs harder, removing whatever makeup he thinks I’m wearing from my cheeks, though there isn’t any. Whatever he’s removing, it’s imaginary, something only he thinks is there—much like our relationship, I suppose.
“No matter what you look like, Cassandra, no matter what you do, no matter who you’re with or where you go, you will always be mine,” he says. “And I will never let you forget that again.”
He pulls down the fabric from my mouth and wipes my raw lips with the burning alcohol, then kisses me. I wince at the sting, even more so at the physical contact, but my back is literally against the wall, and my movement away from him only makes him push his face harder to mine.
My mouth finally free, I think of yelling for help, of screaming like my life depends on it, which it very well might. But if no one comes, if no one hears, then all I will have done is piss off Sebastian. I’ll have less power than I have now, and Sebastian will still have nothing more to lose.
“Please, Sebastian,” I say. “Please, you have to let me go.”
He smiles at me, his face crooked and as unrecognizable as a stranger’s. When we first started dating, I liked how deeply brown his eyes were, so dark compared to my fairer blue ones. They never gave away what he was thinking, and I still can’t tell now. But where I used to think that made him intriguing, now I see in them that he is just very, very far away, hidden and out of earshot, out of sight, like the bottom of a black hole that consumes all the light around it. Destroying it.
He coils one hand around my neck, holding me in place, and with the other, he reaches into the Rite Aid bag again. He lays a large black t-shirt and a pair of heavy, silver scissors next to him on the ledge of the tub. “Be a good girl,” he says, picking up the scissors, “and don’t squirm.”
He lifts the bottom of my tank top and begins to cut up the middle, past my bra, the sound of the sharp metal fraying the thin material like a bitterly cold wind whipping through empty tree branches, hollow and eerie.
“Why are you doing this?” I say. I swallow and try to concentrate on controlling my breathing, wanting to fill my muscles with as much oxygen as possible, summon all the strength I can.
“These clothes, so tasteless,” he says. “I’m afraid the pharmacy didn’t have anything stylish, but at least you’ll be covered up.” He makes the final snip, the tip of the scissors brushing the underside of my chin. The tank top falls open into two halves across my chest. “Such a lovely figure,” he says, placing the scissors back on the ledge. “I’ve so missed seeing you.”
“You’ve never seen me,” I say.
He clucks his tongue. “What a thing to say to your husband,” he says, running a finger across my sternum. “All I’ve ever done is watch over you.”