Nile Dok drags Erna down the hallway as she shouts a multitude of threats and obscenities, until she's out of Commander Brown's earshot anyway. Then her demeanor changes entirely, at once becoming calm and collected, she picks her feet up and walks quietly along with her escort.
After a moment, when he feels sure that her volatile tantrum is over, Nile tells her candidly, "I'm glad that you refused the Commander's offer."
"You sound excited to watch me rot in that dingy cell," Erna says dryly. "You're pretty easily entertained, huh?"
"Actually, I'm not," he says through his nose.
Erna begins to look forward to returning to her cell. It will be fun to play with the other prisoners until her minions break her out – and they will break her out – she thinks. She put a moderate amount of time and effort into convincing them that they can't survive without her, so they should be desperate to get her back right about now.
It may take time. She taught them and drilled them on all of the ins and outs of stealthily breaking into places with all kinds of levels of security, but still… the military police dungeons are a pretty tall order. They might decide to wait until her trial, if they're as smart as she hopes.
In any case, Erna is pretty good at waiting. She can be incredibly patient.
Nile's grip around her upper arm tightens as he steers her past the entrance to her cell block and toward another staircase.
"Where are we going?" she demands to know. He ignores the question and she says a little louder, "Take me back to my cell."
He makes no sign that he's hearing her at all until she begins to struggle. She tries to get out of his grip before they reach the stairs.
He stops her at the top step of the stairs and shakes her arm forward and back as if dealing with a difficult child. He leans over her, his mouth close to her ear, he says quietly, "You're never going back to your cell, Erna."
Erna struggles as hard as she can with her hands secured behind her back, but Nile is bigger and stronger than she is. Still, she hisses and spits like a cat. "Say my name again, filth," she snarls, "want to hear it die in your tight throat when I choke the life out of you."
And with that, he shoves her headlong down the stairs.
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Everything is black for some time.
Upon regaining consciousness, Erna is hit with a sickening wave of nausea, a sign of concussion. The next sensation she notices is a stinging pain in her left eye and from the sticky, dry feeling of the skin around it she guesses that she got some blood in it. Her head must have split open somewhere, but she can't move her arms to find where. So the nausea, she thinks, could be either a concussion, or just a symptom of too much blood lost… or both.
In any case, there's a metallic rattling and a resistance when she tries to move, so she knows she's chained down.
She ascertains all of these things by feeling and hearing because wherever she is, it's pitch black… or she's blind. She decides she'll find out. And the easiest way to find out is for her to yell to the darkness, "Hey, I'm fucking awake here, if anybody gives a shit!"
The acoustics make her think that she's in a small room with a high ceiling, but without all of her senses she doesn't trust her judgment. She'll wait and see if she can get some light to see if she's correct.
There's a sound like shuffling feet and then the sound is gone. Probably a guard has gone to tell someone more important that she requires their attention.
Erna sighs impatiently and starts counting in her head.
She counts out about four hundred and twenty seconds before she hears footsteps coming back, maybe more. She nodded in and out of consciousness once or twice while counting.
There's a high, squealing rusted iron scraping against stone sound that sets her teeth on edge and makes her feel a stinging ache under her tongue that she can only describe as a metallic feeling. Her fingers curl with their own phantom pain as the sensation travels through her whole body like electricity. She curls in on herself, closes her eyes and hisses in pain to which she hears her new guest give a low chuckle.
She blinks hard at the light he's holding and says, "Lovely to see you again, Nile," with a sarcasm that's honey-coated.
He closes the door to the room just as slowly as he opened it, setting off more spasms of psychological pain through Erna's teeth. She cringes again, unable to do anything or hold herself in any way that would lessen the reaction that sound sets off.
Nile smirks, mildly amused by her pain, as he hangs his lamp on one of many hooks set in the stone walls to cast its orange glow over the small stone-walled room. He doesn't return her greeting. Instead he gets right down to business, crossing the floor in three big strides with his long legs, and lifting her by the chain that links her wrists while he says, "On your feet."
An involuntary pained noise escapes her throat as her shoulders nearly get wrenched out of place. The dizziness she was feeling becomes more intense as he moves her and she finds it impossible to get her feet under her. Nile thinks that she's only being difficult. With an annoyed sigh, he drops her, the full weight of her making only a light thud against the floor, followed by a much louder thud as he drives his boot against her ribcage with a vicious kick. He says more loudly this time, "On your feet."
"Nnhh." Erna rolls to her knees. "I'm concussed, not deaf, you prick." Slowly, she drags her right knee up until she gains solid enough footing to push herself to stand.
She's disappointed that Nile doesn't respond to the insult. She always feels a little defeated if she can't get a reaction out of someone. But he ignores her words and moves behind her. As he unlocks her handcuffs she thinks she could kill him… but she'd be too weak to escape. And something else stops her, something that has less to do with logic. It's the fact that Nile is now an evil that she knows, which she likes much better than opening herself to something unexpected like a new assigned guard after she kills this one. So there's that, but there's also the unfortunate fact that she is endlessly curious, sometimes to her own detriment. Part of her says not to kill him just because she wants to see what he'll do next.
She wants to study Nile, play with him, find what makes him tick, and then catch him in a moment of weakness and rip out his insides. That would be more fun than just killing him right now.
When her hands are free she lets them fall to her sides.
Without a wasted second, Nile comes around to face her, cuffs still in hand. He grabs the neck of her shirt and pulls. In her weakened state, she almost falls to the floor again. Rather than knock her over and go through the hassle of getting her back up again, Nile has a better idea and he lets her go so that he can pull a small knife from the inner pocket of his jacket.
Erna watches him with narrowed eyes, not backing away or flinching from the knife. Without emotion, Nile holds still the hem of her shirt and he cuts upward. When the knife reaches her bra, he tugs at it and cuts that in half too. After a couple more rough slashes he rips the rags off of her and lets them fall to the floor.
Erna sets her jaw, wanting to show him that she isn't humiliated in the slightest. She's been through too much. It would take more than one fumbling Military Police guard trying to get a look at her tits to make her feel violated. She rolls her shoulders and yawns before saying, "Is this your idea of foreplay, Dok?"
His face twists with rage and Erna smiles because now she's got a reaction out of him, but before she can truly enjoy it, he spins her around to face away from him and pushes her face first into the wall.
The stone is damp against her cheek. It smells of grime and mildew and earth. They have to be underground. She wonders if she was unconscious long enough for them to move her from the prison or if this is just a lower-level dungeon that she didn't know about.
Nile presses her body to the wall with his and pins her there while he reaches for something above her. Erna snarls, "If you're going to fuck me, at least have the balls to look at my face, you shit-eating little rat."
He grunts as he pulls down the chains he was reaching for and he takes her wrists in one hand and lifts them. The cuffs go back on and he attaches them to a chain that will hold them above her head.
Satisfied that she's secured, he then leans down to whisper, "I wouldn't stick my dick within an inch of any of your diseased holes."
That's some small relief to her.
He grunts close to her ear as he tugs at the chains one more time, testing their steadfastness, as if she weren't too weak to do anything but curse at him anyway.
He backs away and gives himself a moment to recover. She hasn't offered any physical resistance. She couldn't, half-concussed, bleeding, dehydrated, and beat to hell, but her words rile him up and exhaust him pretty easily. She's good with words. She hopes he'll go on being too stupid to gag her.
It's a minute until he calms down and his breathing is slow and even again. He clears his throat a little self-consciously. Erna decides not to say anything to get him riled up all over again, only because she wants to see what he plans to do or say.
From behind her, there's a small sound, a little bit, she thinks, like a rope unraveling. She tries to see what he's up to, but can only turn her head so far, so she gives up on that and rests her forehead against the wall.
Nile doesn't leave her wondering long. The second she feels the fiery sting across her spine and hears the sharp crack, she knows right away what it is. She inhales a little sharply as the pain pricks at her back, but as she exhales it turns into a soft laugh.
"If you're trying to torture me, Nile, a little signal whip isn't going to work."
He punishes her insolence with another lash, this one crossing the opposite way across her back.
As he keeps hitting her, the pain is easier and easier to ignore. She tells herself that the burning feels cool, the sharp stinging inflamed flesh simply isn't there. She wonders if maybe this works on other criminals. If it does, then they must not have ever known what real pain is. Compared to some other experiences she could remember if she cared to, Nile's braided leather whip is less than a mosquito bite. And all pain is – she tells members of her gang when she tests them – only a comparative experience. What you feel is only relative to what you've felt in the past. So, the more intense pain you feel – she usually says as if it's a favor when she's doing something horrid to them – the less future experiences will feel so painful.
Nile persists in whipping her as hard as he can. She thinks she can feel the wetness of blood in some places just before her skin goes numb.
She can feel his frustration. She assumes that he's done this before and gotten quite a different reaction. Erna laughs at the situation and then, deciding to have some fun with him, she moans and in as smooth a tone as she can manage she begs him, "Harder, Nile." As the whip stings her again, she writhes as if in pleasure and moans again, "Do it harder!"
She yelps and sighs like she would if he was fucking her and she wanted to put on a show. When the barrage of whip cracks stops suddenly, she whines as if she's terribly disappointed. She tries to turn her head around a little to complain to him, "I was almost there."
"You little bitch," Nile mutters under his breath. He drops the whip and yanks her cuffed wrists down from the chain holding them high above her head.
Her knees scrape the rough floor when he throws her down and though it hurts, she smiles because she's gotten under his skin again. That's worth almost any pain. He can hurt her, but that doesn't make him the one in control.
She lifts her head and talks at him as he walks toward the door. "There's no point in torturing me, Nile. What do you need? A confession?"
He opens the door and speaks to someone outside. Erna can't hear what he says, but she sees a couple of guards that had been outside scurry away.
"All you had to do is ask," she says cheerily. "You're going to kill me either way. I'll confess to whatever you want."
"That's the problem, Erna," he responds, irritation filling his voice, "I'm not going to kill you. I'd love to, but it's against my orders."
She doesn't believe him. "Do you need me to confess about the murder? I'm not ashamed about it. I killed that nobleman in his bed while he was under me. I wrapped my hands around his throat, held him down while he struggled, and I watched the life flicker out of his panicked eyes. It was lovely. If you could kill a person twice, I would have done it all over again."
That definitely draws Nile's attention away from the hallway. He sneers in disgust. He doesn't even think to close the door to the cell before turning around and coming back to her to deliver a vicious kick to her stomach that throws her onto her back. She winces and her eyes shut as her skin comes alive again with burning pain. She rolls as quickly as possible to her knees again, hoping she can save the cuts on her back from getting dirty and infected – a pointless goal if she's going to die anyway, but even as she resigns herself to that fate the instinct for self-preservation persists.
"Filth," Nile growls at her. "You deserve death."
"Maybe," she hums carelessly. She's thought about her own death more than once, always knowing that this was a possibility. She had, in her dealings, always tried to keep a low profile, doing well enough for herself, but never going for anything too showy, too big, too likely to draw enough attention to make her a criminal with notoriety, knowing that too much fame would motivate the military police to do something about her. Killing the nobleman was too far apparently. But, she'd decided a long time ago, if she has to be executed, she won't mind so much as long as she can manipulate her executioner, not necessarily to convince him not to kill her, but to make them do it at her will, not theirs. As long as she can keep Nile infuriated and control how much of his temper he's losing, making him react exactly the way she expects, she still feels in control and that's a comfort to her.
He glares at her like one would look at a parasite just before crushing it.
She is about to say something to really make him lose it. She doesn't know what, but she feels it on the tip of her tongue. But before she can, a couple of guards come in the open door with a little table on wheels, like a doctor's table, and an assortment of tools. Another one comes in behind them with a heavy wooden chair, and Nile is distracted from his hatred for a moment.
Erna is picked up by her arms and put in the chair, again setting fire to the cuts and marks that the whip painted over her back. As they set to work removing the handcuffs and tying her arms tightly to the chair, she arches her back to minimize contact against the wood.
Nile picks up a very small, innocuous, triangular wedge of wood from the table and holds it up contemplatively. As she struggles, he tells her, "I was going to save this for much later, but…" he trails off.
"I don't understand," she admits. "Do you get off on this? I gave you a confession. You could just kill me now."
"You talk a lot, but you don't listen well, do you?" he says condescendingly. Then he says, "Brown only threatened the execution so that you'd comply with his plan to… expand… the military's training practices. We could care less about that nobleman you killed or the dozens of other crimes you've committed through your proxies."
Nile picks up a pair of small pliers and hands them to one of the guards to hold over an open flame and he keeps talking to Erna, and becomes more and more pleased as the confusion grows in her eyes. "You were barely worth our attention, Erna, which I'm sure was intentional on your part. But still the military police are very observant and while your crimes aren't so impressive, we did notice that your underlings are very well-trained," he picks up a small hammer and holds it along with the little wooden wedge, "and they're incredibly loyal, much more than you normally see among thieves and thugs. We don't know how you achieved that, but we want you to now do it for us."
Erna clenches her teeth and glares at him.
"So I can kill you, but that's only after every other method to convince you to accept Brown's proposal has been exhausted. He thinks that you'll be more useful alive than dead."
He nods at the two guards standing on each side of her and says, "Left hand first." On that cue they each put their hands around her left forearm and wrist, holding it down with as much weight as they can leverage.
"You can confess whatever you'd like to me, Erna," he sneers. "But it won't change your situation."
He doesn't explain what he's about to do. It's more fun for him to watch her eyes widen with terrified recognition as he places the pointed part of the little wooden wedge under the fingernail on her pinky finger.
Against all of her sense of pride, she pleads, "No no no no…"
Nile drives the wedge deeper and deeper under her nail with taps from the hammer and slowly lifts it from the nail bed. Erna howls so loudly that the guard holding the pliers drops them on the table to cover his ears. Nile gives him a mildly annoyed look as he wiggles the small wedge until Erna's nail is only hanging to some stubborn skin. Nile lifts the wedge, sets it on the table and takes up the red-hot pliers. He pulls the nail from Erna's finger ever-so carefully, but still the blood flows and covers Erna's nail bed in red as he tears the skin.
Her vision blurs with black spots, but she fights to stay conscious, gulping air and making pitiful whining noises.
Nile drops the tiny fingernail into a metal bowl. "So, what do you think about that offer now, Miss Raban?" he asks, his voice full of arrogant sarcasm.
Erna keeps gasping for air, struggling to keep his face in focus.
"I'll give you a moment to think." He begins to turn toward the table, reaching for the bowl of water there to clean his tools.
Erna arches her neck and spits, hitting him square in the side of his face before he can fully turn away from her.
The guard who covered his ears earlier gasps. Nile's face contorts with rage, but he says nothing. Slowly and methodically, he removes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his face. When finished, he takes a deep breath, composes himself, and says, "A simple 'no' would have been fine."
He doesn't give her anymore opportunities to surrender and stop her torture as he takes his time removing the rest of her fingernails. She screams loud enough to wake the dead the entire time. The pain is more than anything she's ever felt.
When he's finished, he goes and leans against a wall of the cell. He crosses his arms over his chest as he orders the guards to untie her. They take the chair out from under her, leaving her half-naked on the floor. The handcuffs go back on. The table is wheeled outside.
Nile tells her that maybe he'll be by to give her some water later. He makes no promises. He is the last to leave when the guards have finished.
Left alone in the dark again, Erna wails and rages until shock overtakes her and mercifully puts her to sleep.