Once in the elevator, I had the option to go up or down. I chose up at random. When the doors opened on the second floor, I was a little surprised to find myself in a man’s closet, a huge walk-in with a shitload of suits and shirts, ties, and mirrors all over the place. But still, a closet just the same. A hidden elevator into a closet. That’s some weird shit.
Looking at the plethora of expensive men’s attire, I figured this had to be Fielding’s personal space. I peeked into the adjacent bedroom to see the huge master space, also devoid of other humanity for the time being, no different than the first floor.
After a fairly quick walk-through to make sure Sienna wasn’t tied up somewhere in here or in the en suite bathroom, I made my way to the hallway and scanned every room on the floor as fast as I could. I was being less careful about making noise now—I really didn’t sense anyone else in the house, I hadn’t seen any cars outside in the drive, and I figured this was not going to be the most revealing of searches, in these rooms. Nevertheless, I had to be thorough, or I might end up wanting to kick my own ass if I passed over the opportunity and there was something important to be found up here. So I made like a professional, and I looked.
Every door opened into crystal-clean space—I figured he’d had some maid service come through it in the morning hours, cleaning up after last night’s debauchery. Bedrooms, bathrooms, a couple of closets. There were a lot of mirrors.
But there was nothing showing me where Sienna might be and nothing cluing me in as far as Fielding’s other holdings.
Done with this floor, I sped back to the master bedroom and its fancy closet to recall the elevator. It was time to explore the basement in this house of fucking mirrors.
Chapter Thirteen
Sienna
“Agh!…Ugh!…Ehn!…Ogh!…Nuh!…Ehn!…Ahn!—” So went the keening.
“—Rgh!…Rgh!…Rgh!…Rgh!…Rgh!…Rgh!…” And his guttural ejections.
… And on and on and on…
They painted a clear enough picture, even for my loose hold on consciousness. Maybe they were what were tying me to this world, keeping me from a peaceful blackness. They were my latest torture.
I thought—hoped—I was losing my hold on reality. The eerie, tortured pitches of that voice I knew to be so beautiful but that now sounded so awful, so ugly, so inescapable and incessant, and the rhythmic counterpart of his vicious grunts—both together were blocking my thoughts from forming coherently and blocking my mind from releasing into a void.
I was so very, very cold. My wet hair continued to drip down my neck in a painful release of internal heat that I could feel seeping out of me, moment after moment. My body was uncontrollably shivering with each breath.
After all of the day’s Taserings, I ached throughout. My muscles had no understanding of how they ought to respond to the overstimulation of nerves. My head was pounding as well; it felt like a vice had hold of my brain and was squeezing relentlessly. It was beginning to make me nauseated. I began moaning in time with the girl, to give voice to my pain, as if that would ease it. It almost did, but not really.
Not to mention how I burned. Even in the midst of freezing to death, every part of me that had been lashed was on fire in the cold air of the cell. My breasts, my belly, my arms at my sides, my thighs, my sex. He’d gotten me everywhere except for my face and neck and back.
I was entirely raw. And that lovely now-ugly voice kept up its rhythmic keen of pain and horror. And I moaned and groaned in empathetic counterpoint, letting her know my share of pain, too. Solidarity in torture. Not that that eased the pain in any way; it didn’t, for either of us, I’m sure.
I had no way of knowing if she heard me. And really, what did it matter? I had never been raped, though I could see now that that particular experience was just beyond my horizon. Perhaps minutes, surely not more than hours away. I now knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had to brace for that horror, too.
Because of the ties binding my wrists and ankles together, and the other straps holding my legs apart on either side of this table from hell, my shoulders and hips were aching as well, stuck too long in unnatural positions with no ease for movement.
My breath came in shallowly, and I struggled to control it to avoid hyperventilation. Gah, my entire being was so overly stimulated with ache, pain, cold, discomfort, contraction, shivers, nausea… I had never before been so physically and mentally overwhelmed.
I began just wishing for death. It would have been a welcome end to this horror.