Page 53 of B-ry
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Laurel
I thought I had something to complain about before.
Little did I know that things could get worse.
I never imagined I would fall so hard.
I never envisioned that I could be someone that ended up here.
Yet, as I looked around at the place I had been trapped in for over a week now, I knew that this wasn’t some nightmare that I could shake off.
This was real.
And I was the one caught and trapped by a lock and a bunch of bars. Oh, and I couldn’t forget about the crazy man. The dirty one that looked completely off his rocker. The one that watched me with dark, lifeless eyes.
I was naked but I think at this point I wasn’t even fazed by it. After all, it was the least of my worries.
Bryan called me his Queen. He treated me like one in his own way. But right now, I was far from sitting on a royal throne. I was a prisoner. I was a gilded bird trapped in a cage. Quite literally on the cage part.
A cage that felt like it was made for a midget. Little person? I wasn’t sure which was more politically correct. I supposed I should have taken notice of such things, but it wasn’t like I was faced with that in my life, really.
I didn’t have enough room to fully stand up, so if I wanted to stretch my legs, I had to walk around hunched over. Not that there was much room to walk anyway. Not even five feet by five feet, meaning the so-called bed that was at one end wasn’t nearly long enough for me to spread out in.
I had a bucket in the corner to use… for things that I never imagined doing out in the open. But here I had no choice. Just like I had no choice to do it when the creepy man was sitting there watching my every move.
So far, it seemed like this was a one-manned operation. There hadn’t been anyone else that entered the room. And the place wasn’t soundproof at all. The only voice I had heard this whole time was his. Even as he moved around the house cooking, watching TV, and oddly even vacuuming. Which you would have maybe thought that would have made it easier to escape. But it didn’t matter if I knew where he was because I was locked in this cage.
Locked.
The key? I had no idea because I hadn’t seen one for the big door of the cage yet. These cages had been built with the type of smartness that could only have come from someone that was mentally unstable. And yes, there were three of them in the room I was in. Mine was dead center. The others were empty though and I feared the day they would be filled. What would that mean for me? I supposed that was a bit selfish to think, but it was my life on the line and all. I wouldn’t doubt that when he got a shiny new toy that the old one would be forgotten about.
Back to the cages. They had a smaller door in the corner where the bucket was. The space was only big enough so he could remove the bucket to clean and then replace it. From what I had seen so far, there was no escape for me. I was tiny, but not nearly small enough to slip through that little opening.
Not even if I kept wasting away.
He fed me, sure. At first, I refused to eat. But I knew I needed to keep up my strength. So I took his taunting and cruelty. And when he brought a bag of cheap, flat hamburgers in, I made a decision on the third day. He laughed and shoved his mouth full of those burgers. They actually smelled so good that my mouth watered. I knew I was desperate then because that smell should have made me think of how bad they were for me. But it didn’t and all I could think about was knowing if they tasted as good as they smelled.
He threw the last little bites through the bars of the cage and I scrambled to get to them, pushing them into my mouth without an ounce of hesitation. There wasn’t a moment to care about anything else. Not the fact that those little morsels had his germs all over them. Or that they had bounced off of the dirty cage floor. Or that a few of them had actually hit the outside of my waste bucket. I didn’t care. I dove after each one as he tossed them in. I had no idea that one could consume so many burgers at once, but he did.
In the end, I think I might have actually gotten enough to make a full burger. It didn’t feel like it was enough but it was something at least.
“I wonder how he would feel if he could see you now?” the crazy man asked. Though, I didn’t think he was really looking for an answer.
I wasn’t sure if he was aware of it or not, but he sort of clued me in just a little. I was here because of someone. I imagined that by his tone this was his way to get back at someone. Take something from this person that had wronged him. Or cut him down? I had no idea. Just like I didn’t have the first clue as to thehethat he was referring to.
At first thought, I would have said it might have been my father that he could have been talking about. Sure my family made a lot of people mad. For stupid reason sometimes too. Like the fact that we had wealth. However, that didn’t really make sense seeing as I’d been cut off from my family.
That led me down a path of wondering what would happen if my dad found out I had been kidnapped. Would he be sad? Would he do everything in his power to get me back? Would he shrug and turn the other way?
I didn’t even have to imagine what my mother would do. Deep down, I knew she had already washed her hands of me.
I couldn’t stop the tears as they rolled down my cheeks. I would like to have said that this was the first time that I had broken down and cried, but it wasn’t. It probably wasn’t even the tenth. I hated that I had let myself crack so many times here in this stupid, dirty cage.
I curled up on the bed and willed myself to sleep, praying that he would just leave.
I woke to an empty room. My hips ached. My calves were cramping. My knees burned from being bent all night. There was a crick in my neck and my hands were numb from using them as a pillow for so long. But I was alone. I didn’t have his dirty, creepy eyes on me and I felt like I could breathe for a second.
