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Chapter 22
'Revenge!—the word seemed balm to me; I hugged it, caressed it, till, like a serpent, it stung me.' — Mary Shelley
BPOV
Last time in Gothic, our heroine let herself be locked inside Edward Cullen's vehicle. A vehicle not being driven by Edward Cullen. It is because of incidents such as this that we are inclined to suspect that book smarts amount to very little in the real world.
My first conscious thought was that I had gone mad.
I had gone insane and there was no longer any reason to feign sanity now that gibbering chaos was at my back.
This realization, the discovery that I had lost my sanity, was really what roused me.
Because how else was I to explain the fact that, in the twenty-first century no less, I was locked in a dungeon?
There was no other explanation: The pressure of circumstances had destroyed my last shreds of lucidity and I was in the thrall of a hallucination.
A shudder stole over me as I took in my predicament. A throbbing skull barred any hasty movement, even without the manacles.
My God, manacles?!
The chill dampness was to be explained by the water dripping slowly down the stone wall to which I was chained.
But the other details of my immediate surroundings remained murky in the weak sputtering light that came from some unknown source behind me, no doubt a torch in the grip of a crypt-keeper.
And then—
As if all the rest were not sufficient to render me senseless again with sheer terror—
I began to make out, too, the rattle of some shackles and an intermittent groan, as if the skeleton of my cell's former inmate was rearing to life at my back as I lay there helpless, a ghoul intent upon inflicting upon me some unimaginable agony as punishment for my involuntary intrusion upon his domain.
I closed my eyes, wondering what new horror awaited me next.
"Fuck!" the ghost cursed.
And with that short utterance, I knew that I was not mad. Or if I was mad, at least I was not alone, for I was accompanied by none other than Edward Anthony Cullen, a creature whose strange ways confused and befuddled me, but who I wanted to believe was no longer the tormentor of my youth.
I felt a sudden rush of hope. Surely Edward was here to rescue me.
Right?
"Edward?" I whispered, wincing in pain as I tried to turn my head.
"Bella? Thank fucking God! I thought for a minute that they'd fucking killed you."
I was barely able to make out Edward's form on the far side of the small room. He appeared to be in much the same condition as I, handcuffed to a pipe running along the wall. We were the room's sole occupants, not one stick of furniture to suggest the room's purpose, although the exposed pipes and concrete suggested an association with industry.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"In some warehouse. That crazy bitch Victoria had some guy hit me over the head with a tire iron. When I woke up, he was handcuffing me to this pipe." Edward rattled his handcuffs in annoyance. "A while later, he carried you in. Unconscious. What's the last thing you remember?"
It hurt to think, but I gave it my best. "I was going to the Porsche—oh." I was an idiot. "I don't remember anything after that." I felt as if I'd been hit over the back of the head. "Except that a woman was driving."
"Red hair?"
"Yeah."
"Victoria. James' girlfriend. I think she's the one who killed Tanya. She's got some guy working with her. I don't think I've seen him before."
"They just left us here?"
"They've been in and out a couple of times. Waiting for you to wake up, I think." Edward growled, straining at his cuffs.
"What are you doing?" I asked, though it was fairly obvious.
"I'm trying to get out of the handcuffs. Or pull the pipe off of the wall. Whichever works first."
"It doesn't look like either one is working."
"It's not."
I looked at the handcuffs around my own wrists. They were rather tight, so I didn't think that I'd be able to free myself of them easily. Giving a tentative shove to the one-inch pipe to which I was manacled, I wasn't encouraged by the resistance I felt. Resolved nevertheless to try, I braced my bare feet against the wall, my flats apparently having fallen off when I was carried in, and gripped the pipe in both hands, pulling with all my might.
My head began throbbing even more with the strain. I had to give up after a minute.
"Bella, you're going to hurt yourself," Edward warned, but I wasn't inclined to think that we should be indulging the opportunity to spare ourselves just then.
Trying again, I was forced to give up this time when my hands slipped from the slick pipe and I slumped against the cold ground.
I waited until I had recovered some of my strength, and tried again. And again. And again. Wrenching at the pipe, pushing and shoving at it in frustration, hoping that I could force it to give way just a little, only for me to collapse, gasping for breath.
"I'm so sorry," Edward groaned as he too took a break. "This is all my fault."
This was not the time for recrimination. We had to focus on escaping.
"I think," I said, rubbing my hands together to ease the sting. "I remember now. Well, I don't remember everything. But I remember getting out of your car."
Victoria had parked in a loading zone and had ordered me out of the car. Broken windows and boarded up doorways were adorning the rundown buildings on every side. I seriously doubted that there would be anyone in the vicinity willing to lend me assistance.
I swallowed. "And the woman—Victoria?—had a gun. I reached for it but something hit me on the back of my head."
"You were going to fight her?" Edward asked incredulously.
"What else was I supposed to do?"
"Scream for help?"
"She might have shot me," I reminded him, bracing my feet against the wall again.
"She might have shot you if you tried to take the gun," Edward pointed out rather erroneously since I did try to take the gun and I hadn't been shot.
I closed my eyes and conjured up an image of the Count of Monte Cristo. What a clever and unflagging chap.
Where would he have been if he'd just given up? I asked myself, refusing to relent. And this time, my efforts were rewarded as I finally felt the pipe begin to give way.
Sagging with relief, I took another minute to catch my breath. "Listen," Edward was saying, "if they come back, I'll—" blah blah blah, and "You just pretend to still be unconscious." Not bothering to interrupt Edward's speech with news of my success—no need to get his hopes up yet—I began pulling again.
The Count of Monte Cristo, indeed.
Where was my treasure? I wondered as my muscles burned. My revenge?
The only person—or at least one of the only people—on whom I would have wanted to take revenge was presently locked up in this dungeon right alongside me.
And revenge was such a nonsensical emotion. I couldn't imagine myself wanting it. Even this Victoria—
I remembered the animals on my doorstep and felt a surge of anger, hissing as I wrenched at the pipe.
In the end, I was almost sobbing with the struggle, but I laughed out loud when I managed to pull the pipe from the wall. It was only by a fraction of an inch, but it was enough.
"Holy shit," Edward said, breaking off a detailed explanation of his "Plan" mid-sentence.
Afraid that I had already made too much noise trying to wrestle with the pipe, I quietly inched my way along the floor, holding the chain of the handcuffs off of the metal so that it didn't make any noise as I slipped it over the bolt that had attached the pipe to the wall, and dragged myself to the end of the pipe. I slipped the chain past the end of the pipe itself, grateful for the state of disrepair that had left this one length of pipe unfinished, water dripping out of the opening.
The pain in my head making me dizzy, I wobbled as I rose to my feet and turned towards Edward. Whereas I'd had to detach only one bolt from the wall, he had four. And his pipe was finished, so that we would also have to undo one of the joints if we hoped to get him free.
I stumbled over to Edward, dropping to the floor with my feet against the wall and my hands around the pipe.
Edward counted off, and we pulled, but it was no good.
We lay next to each other, gasping for air as we rested up for another try.
"Jasper will look for us," I said, sotte voce. "Unless you told him that you were going to pick me up."
"I didn't have a chance," Edward answered, his voice equally low as we endeavored to conduct our conversation in hushed tones.
"See? We'll be fine."
Which was bullshit because even if the police were already looking for us—which I doubted—they probably had no way of tracing us to wherever it was we'd been taken.
"Well," I said, finding some consolation in the knowledge that I was not in fact in a dungeon at the mercy of a chained skeleton, "at least I'm not crazy."
Edward cast me a weary glance, and we resumed our assault on the pipe.
"This is a waste of time," Edward groaned quietly after several more failed attempts. "You need to just go. Try to find a way out."
"And leave you?" I didn't like this idea. There was safety in numbers, wasn't there? Even if one of us was chained to a wall.
"Don't you like horror movies? How did they get out of this in Saw?"
"What? Why not?" Edward asked, his voice was ragged with exhaustion.
"They cheat," I explained logically.
"Cheat?" Edward appeared bemused, his manner entirely out of keeping with the nature of our situation.
"Everyone's afraid of serial killers. It's too easy. True horror should make you fear something that you know can't hurt you."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"I think it makes perfect sense." I started to brace my feet again, wrapping my aching hands around the pipe.
"Bella, just go."
I closed my eyes and pulled, but the pipe just wouldn't move and Edward wasn't even bothering to help.
Sighing, I sat up and gazed down at Edward. He was sprawling awkwardly on the ground next to me, his long legs folded up against the wall and his arms suspended from the pipe.
"I'll get the police," I told him.
"Yeah," Edward nodded, his expression resolute, as if he had absolute faith in me.
I wondered how he could possibly be so sure about me when I wasn't sure about me.
I swallowed with difficulty.
Edward's features, I decided, were not without some charm, even to someone of my discerning tastes.
"Fine," I agreed, getting to my feet carefully, still feeling dizzy and discouraged by the wave of nausea that washed over me. The concrete flooring was cold and rough against my bare feet. The light, I realized, was coming from a fluorescent panel in the ceiling of the hallway outside the small room where we'd been left.
"Be careful," Edward warned.
I cast one last lingering glance at him, but couldn't think of anything to say.
Turning around, I peered into the hallway. The corridor was empty. Several doorways led off of the hallway and an elevator shaft stood at the far end.
I didn't let myself think about what I would do if I ran into Victoria or her new boyfriend. Or what they would do if they returned and found Edward all alone.
I quickly tiptoed into the passageway, scurrying to the first opening and pausing to listen before peering inside. Amorphous machines of indeterminate purpose and worktables cluttered up the space, but there was no exit in sight.
Quickly making my way to the next opening, I found the same thing.
Two more openings led to other hallways, the rest leading to rooms like the first.
Having no choice but to take my chances, I slipped into the second hallway.
I had never had a very good sense of direction. Now with a pounding headache, I was by no means at my best. Still, I tried to navigate the twists and turns of the labyrinthine system of rooms and hallways in which I found myself. It was no good. It was too dark to see where I was going and I was dizzy and confused.
I thought back to all of the times that I'd gotten lost in the past. It happened so regularly that I hardly paid any attention to it anymore. I always left extra time whenever I had to go somewhere new. I would joke about it with people. "I know that I haven't arrived until I've made at least one u-turn." It wouldn't be very funny if Edward died because of me, would it?
My heart was already racing and my stomach was already sick with nausea, but I began to feel a real sense of dread as I became increasingly lost.
How long ago had I left Edward? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?
They'd probably realized that I was missing.
What were they doing to Edward?
Panicked, I decided to try and make my way back to him. But then I realized that I couldn't even figure out how to do that. There were no windows, so I had no way of knowing what time of day it was or how much time was passing.
Frantic, I quickened my pace, only to trip over a piece of stray equipment in the meager light and bruise myself against the jagged edges of the instrument. I still had no idea what purpose the warehouse or factory had served, but whatever its function, it seemed to have sat in disuse for some time, my fingers slick with the dust that covered the tools. But I remembered the fluorescent lighting behind me, and I took comfort in knowing that even if the building wasn't in common use, there was still enough activity for someone to continue paying the electric bill. We might not be able to expect help soon, but someone would eventually come. If only to find our corpses.
After I had been wandering for what seemed like an hour—by which point I was nearly hysterical with anxiety, my breaths coming in shuddering sobs—I came upon a staircase.
In my haste to escape, I began scrambling up the steps, only to freeze at the sound of a woman's voice raised in anger.
"Tell me where the fuck she is or I swear to God I will put a bullet in your fucking skull."
Oh my God!
Creeping up the stairs slowly on my hands and knees, I hesitated at the top, carefully peeking over the last few steps to see a huge vacant space, some two stories tall, with grimy windows along the roof letting in a scanty, hazy light.
Edward was kneeling on the ground, his wrists still in handcuffs in front of him. The redheaded woman who I'd met in the car, Victoria, was standing in front of him, aiming a gun at his forehead.
"I can't find her," I heard a man pant, and saw the speaker emerge from another stairwell on the far side of the room. Clearly my sense of direction was so poor that, while I had been wandering in circles, Victoria and her accomplice had had time not only to discover my disappearance, but to drag Edward upstairs while looking for me.
"Call the slut's name," Victoria ordered Edward.
"Fuck you," he spat.
Holy shit!
I heard the safety of the gun clicking off. "Isssabella," she screamed, drawing out my name in a sickening sybillant sound. "I'm going to blow a fucking hole in your boyfriend's skull if you don't come out right the fuck now!"
"I'm here," I lurched up the last three steps. "I'm here."
This isn't real.
I stretched out a hand in a senseless request—for what? Help? Mercy? We were going to die.
At the sound of my voice, Edward's face had crumpled, all of the hope seeming to go out of him.
"I'm sorry," I told him, because I had failed him and I had failed Bree and I had had so many opportunities to stop this from happening and I'd ignored them all. Because I'd never imagined that something like this could happen to me.
"No," he stopped me. "I'm sorry."
Victoria's accomplice lurched over to me and, grabbing me roughly by the arm, dragged me in front of Victoria and shoved me to my knees.
Is this what this is like? I wondered, disbelieving.
No, it couldn't be. I refused to accept it.
It was all happening too fast.
This isn't real!
"I don't understand," I stuttered, hazarding a glance at Victoria as if the sight of her alone would be enough to help me understand.
Because I couldn't understand. It was illogical. Irrational. It just didn't make sense.
And the realization that I was going to die without knowing why I was going to die seemed to let loose a wailing cry that only I could hear, a dissolution too absolute to ever be rectified, madness indeed, and the victory of all of the monsters of the Roiling Abyss and the Mountains of Madness combined.
This. Isn't. Real.
I felt Edward beside me and I began to shake at the realization that he was going to be here at the end after all.
All of those times in high school that Edward had made me wish that I could just disappear, just Not Be, were coming to fruition here, with him, beside him, and it didn't make sense.
Suicide, which I'd not seriously considered for so long, that at least had made sense, at least to me. This was insane. Because it had been eight years or more since I'd last thought of killing myself—bound up as that urge was with so many memories that I no longer let myself dwell upon. I didn't want to die now. And this was sheer insanity.
It didn't make any fucking sense.
"Why are you doing this?" I heard myself ask, in a gruesome parody of every stock drama of a suspenseful bent, the hackneyed question driven not by reason or calculation, I knew, but by the simple terror that I would die without understanding.
And though it didn't make sense, because any sane criminal would have just killed us at once, but perhaps because she was insane, Victoria began to explain.
"Did you think I would just let you get away with it?" she demanded, nudging Edward's chin with the gun.
"With what?" I prompted, not because I thought that I might buy time and allow us to find a way out of this alive, but because I couldn't help myself.
"You stupid bitch," Victoria wheeled on me. "Lying for your boyfriend so that he wouldn't go to jail. Pretending to be the good little policeman's daughter so that everyone believed you. But I watched you. I saw you two together again. I knew that you were just waiting for enough to time to pass so that no one would be suspicious."
"I didn't lie."
Pain shot across my jaw as Victoria slapped me.
"Leave her alone," Edward yelled, and I heard the sounds of a struggle, but when I looked back, I saw Victoria's accomplice with a gun to Edward's temple, forcing him down again.
"Wait," I begged, tears filling my eyes, either with the pain of the slap or the trauma of knowing that I was about to die. I looked at Victoria, pleading. "Please. You have to believe me. I wouldn't have—"
I was afraid to deny lying again.
So instead I asked her a question. "Do you have any idea what Edward put me through in high school?"
Victoria huffed. "James told me all about you. A loser who covered for the class hero just so that he would fuck you. Maybe you did see him, but so what? You could've kept your mouth shut. I had it set up so nicely. And you ruined it! I'm sure he rewarded you for your efforts."
My stomach rolled. "That isn't true. You can't—I hated him. I would have slit my wrists before I let him anywhere near me." I would have swallowed poison to keep the old Edward away from me.
Victoria cackled. A witch from one of Durer's etchings, her hair wild and her eyes flashing. "You think you hate him? You don't know anything about hate."
"I know sitting with an exacto knife in the dark tracing the vein on your arm, one time two times three times over and over again for hours, and planning to go into the woods to do it, to a meadow where no one is around, so that your father isn't the one who has to find you, in his kitchen, because you can't take it, not one more minute, because you'll have to go back to school the next day, and he'll be there."
I remembered the surge of anger that I'd felt, too, seeing Edward in my meadow the day that Tanya died. It was my meadow. He had no right. I had finally graduated, after all. I was done with high school and his daily torment. I'd no plans to kill myself that afternoon, the Roiling Abyss was behind me at last and I had no way of knowing that college would be just another kind of hell. I had wanted to visit my meadow one last time, to just sit there and enjoy my peace—utterly alone, no one watching, no one judging, commenting, laughing. I was steeling myself for the ordeal of visiting my mother and her new husband. So imagine my horror when I arrived at the meadow and found him sitting there.
I knelt on the floor of that warehouse/factory, remembering that day so long ago, and I could felt the weight of Edward's eyes as they bored holes into the side of my face.
I refused to look at him, to grant him the mercy of acknowledging his scrutiny. What did he know of self-loathing? I wasn't ashamed, even if suicide wasn't exactly the sort of thing that one ever mentioned in polite company, because it was far better that one shove the memories down, memories like shards of glass pressing up through the skin.
If I was utterly ignorant about so many things—like the cultivation of a conversation and the security of friendship and the expression of true compassion—Edward was the inexperienced one here. If I was broken, he was mute, deaf, blind, dumb. He could never understand. He was shallow. He could never imagine what it was like to want to—
Victoria studied me, as if judging what I'd just said, weighing my veracity. "Did he tell you why he deserves to suffer?" she asked.
I imagined inflicting the kind of torment on Edward that he'd once inflicted upon me. Watching him bend and break. Making him hate himself.
But that would make me no better than the monster he'd once been. And I was better than him. Too good for him.
Besides, Edward might never be able to take back the things he'd once done, yet I knew what he was like now. He had changed. There was no point in punishing the person he was now for crimes a decade old.
"I know everything that he did to me," I said. "I don't know what he did to you."
Victoria rocked back and forth on her feet, her eyes rocketing around the wide open room. "Riley knows," she said, looking at her accomplice. "Edward should know too, but he is clearly too much of a liar to have admitted the truth to you. Or maybe mommy never told her poor baby the truth." Her eyes flashed to my face again. "James knew, but then Edward made him go away. I could have killed Edward for what he did to James but I knew that he would come back for you eventually. And I wanted you to have to pay too. You ruined my revenge!"
And then I was making a bid for more time, not that I thought it would help, but because Who the Fuck was this Bitch to think that she had a right to her revenge when I'd ceded my claim?
And who was she to drag me into it?
Fuck her!
"What did Edward do to you?" I asked.
Victoria bent over at the waist and pressed the gun to the center of my chest. "What do you think he did?"
I closed my eyes and willed my heart to slow its hammering.
"It's me you want. Let her go," I heard Edward growl.
"He was born," Victoria hissed. "He had a mommy and a daddy and what did I have? His mother just up and abandoned my mother, her own sister, and I was left with only a father and I had nothing. Do you know what my childhood was like?"
And that was when Florence and the Machine's Shake It Out erupted from the corner of the room.
"What the—?" Victoria whirled in the direction of the sound, only to be struck down as a body slammed into her from the opposite side.
"Seth!" I sobbed, unable to believe what I was seeing. Seth had appeared out of nowhere, it seemed, and was now wrestling on the ground with Victoria as a curse sounded from my right. I turned to see Edward struggling with Riley.
Clambering to my feet, I threw myself on Riley's back, scrambling for leverage.
"Stop Bella!" Edward yelled at me, but I slipped the loop of my handcuffs over Riley's head and wrapped one of my arms around his throat, trying to cut off his air, utterly terrified, both of killing Riley and of not killing him, and forced myself to squeeze as hard as I could because I couldn't be the reason that Riley and Victoria hurt anyone else, not easing up on the pressure until I felt the man beginning to crumble under me.
"I've got the gun," Edward said. Thank God, I thought as I struggled to disentangle myself from Riley, who wasn't entirely unconscious as he slumped to the ground, his hands going to his throat.
But then the noise of the other gun going off behind me stopped my heart in my chest. I pushed myself away from Riley and turned, afraid that I would find that Seth had been shot.
Staggering in Seth's direction, I couldn't see any blood at first, because Seth's body was on top of Victoria's. I yanked on Seth's shoulder, ignoring Edward's warning, and froze in horror.
A red pool was spreading across Victoria's chest.
And in shock, it seemed, at the gun going off, Seth had ceased to fight for it.
Leaving the weapon to Victoria, who was now aiming it unsteadily in my direction.
Before she could fire, I felt myself being shoved roughly to the side so that I fell to my hands and knees.
I spun around and gasped as Edward collapsed backward.
AN:
Rec: Anybody There by Kat097 AU AH. "I'm not a damsel in distress and I sure as hell didn't put out a flyer for a white knight." Sometimes the damsel wants to do things her own damn way, despite her feelings for the man who wants to save her. B/E. Complete with outtakes. Rated: Fiction M - English - Romance/Drama - Bella, Edward - Chapters: 40 - Words: 163,342 - Reviews: 693 - Favs: 643 - Follows: 225 - Updated: Oct 12, 2009 - Published: Aug 4, 2009 - Status: Complete - id: 5276194