For a start I'm very sorry this took so long. My motivation died and then so did my charger so even when my muse came back, I couldn't do anything to appease it. Then I went away for a few days so basically everything that could have happened to delay this story happened. (Also it was my slacking, not gonna lie). But it shouldn't take so long in future.
Blood bubbled under her fingernails as Sam lashed at the face of the man whose fingers twisted through her hair. He howled in both pain and rage and the hand holding her loosened, sending her tumbling to the hard ground. The impact sent pain shooting right down to her bones. She bit down so hard on her lip that the foul taste of blood seeped into her mouth. She swallowed rather than spat, hopelessly grappling with that last shred of her dignity.
She saw the foot swing towards her, but didn't have the energy to even curl herself into a ball before it thudded into the concave rock her stomach had become, wasted like the core of an apple from weeks of starvation. She stared into the pooled shaft of light that crept in through the open door, wondering if she welcomed or dreaded it. She'd been petrified of the dark since her father had locked her in the closet with the corpse of their cat and told her that if she ever, ever breathed a word about him, she'd be taken away and shut in darkness for far longer than the night he left her to scream. But no matter how much the dark froze her in a trap of her own fear, she knew it was when the light came that she was in danger.
The light was here now.
More hands seized her, clasping her arms, her hair, one crushing her jaw. They dragged her to her feet and out of the safety of the darkness. She struggled, although all of her training was screaming at her not to. Struggling in a fight you couldn't win would only get you more hurt, but Sam was past caring about the damage they could do to her body. She had not lied to Leo. No one would care did she not step of the plane back in London. Her fight came from the small spark from the embers of a dying fire that would not let them win.
Relief struck her so strongly when they threw her down that she would have fallen to the floor had she not already been collapsed on it. They had led her to the room she met with the boy; the young one who was not quite a friend, but closer than an enemy.
Sam pulled herself to her feet with the solidarity of the wall as soon as they left them alone. She was too tired to scream, but they no longer expected it. She'd let her cries grow weaker and weaker until they'd faded altogether, sucked into the void that she was becoming.
That time, something was different. It was like waking up to find someone had crept inside your bedroom in the night and painted the walls just one shade darker. Most people probably wouldn't even notice, putting it down to a cloudy day if they did, but it was still there, a subtle change that would have you searching through your things, sure that something was missing because the world was not quite on kilter.
The boy pulled something out from behind his back. A plate of her usual stale bread, but on the side of the plate, still in her vision but placed as if it had no real importance, were six squares of chocolate. Sam had never indulged in too many sweet snacks, preferring to keep her fitness for her active life, but the hunger that gnawed so deeply inside her stomach that it had begun to chew at her muscles wailed at the sight. Moisture threatened to drown her, filling her mouth until it almost trapped the air in her lungs.
"You can have it," said the boy, placing it down on the floorboards in front of her. Sam had to hold herself back from pouncing on it right away. She'd spent a long drag in the darkness without food. Another animal stirred inside her when he placed a tall glass of water beside it. Her tongue slicked over her cracked lips. "If you fuck me."
Shock moulded her to the spot, freezing even the beating of her heart in a cold grip. But madly, irrationally, it was the word that she reacted to. It sounded foreign coming from the mouth of the boy she'd come to see as innocent, a victim almost as much as she was, born into a family he was not a part of and dragged into a life he could not live. The crazy urge to reprimand him on his language struck her suddenly, and she almost did, because she was wordless of any other way to respond.
Instead, she did something even more unexpected. She laughed. The sound filled the darkest corners of the room, but rather than banishing the shadows that lay within them, it made them grow. They crept along the lightly dusted floor, growing like vines along the walls. Or maybe that was just her vision fading. She scrunched her eyes shut and continued to laugh, not stopping until she felt the slap that knocked her into the wall to be consumed by the shadows.
…
On the fringes of her consciousness, the strangeness of her dream began to float away until she could barely grasp the outline. The boy had been involved, he had asked her…asked her…but the last of the details slipped into the oblivion of her memory before she could recall them. But there was something strange about the real world too. She prised her lids apart a crack to see she had not been wrong. It was too light. She was not in her cell. She was not even downstairs. The window on the far wall had no ground lurking beneath it.
She was in the room with the boy. The information zapped her into complete consciousness as the details of the dream flooded in. He'd asked, no, told¸ her to have sex with him. In return for food; food he didn't have to tell her she'd not be allowed until she did. He'd said fuck. She'd laughed. And it had been horribly and terrifyingly real. The food was still there, and so was the glass of water, standing quivering and tall beside its plastic company.
Her muscles shot into a rigid stillness as she felt a touch ghost along her hair, running down to her neck. She shivered and the tension evaporated, replaced by scraping nails, a balled fist flying towards his temple, a knee wedged into this groin. Then he was fighting back with a grip around her jugular. She choked. Her arms collapsed at her sides, dead weights on either side of her body, knuckles dragging along the floor. The fight was over in mere seconds and a wave of self-loathing crippled her defences. Crystals pricked in the corners of her bulging eyes.
What did her training mean when she couldn't fight off someone barely old enough to grow a beard?
You're hurt, the rational commander barked. You're malnourished, dehydrated, concussed, exhausted. That is not weakness. Do not believe they have beaten you.
Never believe you have lost.
Sam's knee jerked up again, thrusting into his groin as it had done before and he crumpled. She fell with him, gasping, coughing, her hands flying to her throat as the black spots that had taunted her faded. The colours seeped back into the room. She rolled onto her feet before she was ready and the walls swayed.
The boy giggled.
"You'll sleep with me soon," he simpered, then he swept the food and water into each hand and was gone, leaving Sam with tight fists and stance spaced, poised for a fight that was not to come.
…
This was a little shorter, but I wanted to get it up because I'd already made you all wait so long.
