Page 50 of Stolen By the Billionaire
16
Enchilada Torture
Sarah
As they ate supper, Sarah schemed.
And tried not to cry.
She was sniffling and holding back tears because the supper that the housekeeper had left for her and Blaze Robinson tasted like chemical weapons were peeling the flesh off her tongue, gums, and the roof of her mouth.
How did people eat spicy food like this? If she ate this for a week, her head would be nothing but a skull bobbing around on her neck.
However, even through the torture, she schemed about how to escape.
The unbreakable windows and doors were locked shut.
Everything seemed to be controlled by Blaze’s voice.
So, Sarah’s only hope was to brainwash him into letting her go. She’d seen enough Lifetime movies to know how it was done.
During supper, Sarah sat with her head down and methodically shoveled the lava laced with nuclear fire into her mouth, chewed it, and washed it down her gullet with five glasses of chemical-tasting city water from the filter pitcher.
She could not be weak and groggy from hunger if the unlikely opportunity for escape presented itself. She needed to outrun, or at least outsmart, a former special forces officer.
Her chances of escape and freedom were almost zero, but almost-nothing did not equal zero. That, at least, she’d learned in high school algebra class.
That sliver of a chance was why Sarah used her spoon to carve off another bite of the cornmeal wrap filled with shredded chicken and hot coals smothered with red napalm sauce that had been reheated with a welding torch, toss it in her mouth, give it a few strong chews, and swallow it down.
Even the rice was seasoned with the burning phosphorus from fireworks, as far as she could tell.
At least the salad was cooling, though the lettuce and chopped vegetables were oddly watery and tasteless.
Blaze Robinson’s dishware was pretty, though. On the farm, Sarah had earthenware plates and cups passed down from her maternal grandmother. They were good, honest dishes that weighed a ton and didn’t break when she dropped them on the linoleum.
The plates that the chicken and magma wraps were served on were unblemished white porcelain, she was pretty sure, and as delicate as a baby’s ear.
As they’d been eating in silence for fifteen minutes, Sarah ventured, “Your dishes are pretty.”
“Thanks,” he said. “They came with the house.”
“You didn’t pick out your own dishes?” she asked, as much to make conversation as because it was the obvious question.
Blaze Robinson shrugged and gestured toward himself between the bites of plasma from the center of the sun that didn’t seem to be affecting him at all. “I wouldn’t know anything about dishes.”
“I’ve just never heard of a house coming with dishes before.”
He lifted his dark eyebrows and turned one hand over to reveal his empty palm, an expression of their mutual confusion about the issue. “They’re bespoke.”
Sarah lifted the plate to peek underneath it, but it was just blank porcelain on the underside, too. “They can speak? Like, they have Bluetooth or something?”
Blaze shook his head and stabbed his meal with his fork. “Bespoke means custom. They were specially made to match the furniture, I think.”
At least she was getting him to talk to her. Maybe Sarah could finagle him to see that she was a human being so she wouldn’t end up in a pit putting lotion on her skin. “So, the furniture came with the house, too?”
Blaze Robinson nodded and kept eating.
She said, “When my friend Margerie Stoltzfus’s family gave up farming and bought a condo in Iowa City, they had to buy all new furniture.”
