Page 90 of The Trap by Catherine
That’s an important detail, she thinks. Something she needs to remember for when she gets out. She will find a way to escape, like Lena did, and when she does it’s vital she’s able to lead the guards back to the spot she ran from.
She looks around, moving her eyes but not her head, because when she does the pain gets worse, and the way he has her tied only permits a little movement.
The room is small and bare, the walls sprayed with spots of black mould. Rings of brown—spreading water stains—cling to all four corners of the ceiling, and a particularly dark one in the middle, above a bulb-less ceiling light, sags a little, as if whatever’s above it is threatening to fall through. Branches of some root have sprung up in a far corner. The floorboards are bare. A large, industrial-looking pipe covered in rusty scales is jutting up from the floorboards by her right side; the other end of the chain that binds her is tied to it.
She can’t see a door. It’s either behind her or there isn’t one.
There is, however, a square hatch in the ceiling with a series of fingertips marked out around its edges, in the dust.Perhaps he’s been coming and going through there.
Lucy has never seen him arrive or leave her. Whenever she wakes up, he’s either failed to appear before she falls back asleep, or he’s already there when she opens her eyes.
Like now.
He’s standing in the corner, arms folded, back against the wall. Watching her silently, impassively, expressionless. He’s very tall and she’s lying on the floor, so he looms over her like some supernatural monster, even though she knows he’s just a man.
Shehopesthat he is, in there somewhere, still.
Despite all evidence to the contrary.
“Where is she?” she asks with what’s left of her voice, which isn’t much. The words burn her throat and she feels her lips crack and split, protesting against her moving them. A trickle of warmth as blood bursts from a rip in the middle of her bottom one. Her tongue feels swollen and unwieldy in her mouth. “Where’s Nicki?”
“Where’s Nicki?” he repeats, mocking her.
“Please.”
She’d done everything he asked. She’d got into his car. She’d paid the toll.
Now, she needs to know.
Not like she’d needed to know before, out there, for the last year. That, she’s come to understand over these last few... however long she’s been here. Hours. Days. Weeks. That, she knows now, had been awant. She’dwantedto know where Nicki was, what had happened to her, whether she was alive or dead.
To silence the questions.
Banish the mystery.
But things are different now. Now she’s here, with him. Now she actually doesneedto know what happened to Nicki, because that is the last thing standing between her and a blind, primal panic.
The only thought still tethering her to her sanity.
The only hope she has left.
Because Lucy knows it’s over.
Even as she was telling herself to remember the detail of the cellar, she knew she’d never be able to tell anyone about it. She’d never get the chance. He was going to kill her soon.
He nearly had already.
But that was OK, that would be OK, everything would be OK if, before he did that, she could feel it, just for a moment.
Knowing.
“Where is she?” she asks. “Where’s Nicki?”
And that’s when he frowns and says, “Who?”
The pain on the side of her head seems to dislodge itself and float over her vision, making it difficult to see, so she mostly hears him cross the floor and hunch down beside her, and then feels him trace a single finger down the side of her face.
Across her bare chest.
