A soft, helpless sound slips out of me before I can stop it.
"You need to stop that," he says.
"I'm trying." I shift against the cushion. "These chains don't exactly help."
Something moves across his face. Not quite guilt, but adjacent to it. He scrubs a hand over his jaw. "I'm sorry. None of this was planned the way it's playing out. I'll figure something else out for the chains, but I need to get some things sorted first."
"How long do you expect me to be here?"
"As long as it takes." His eyes hold mine. "This isn't a game, Harvee."
My name in his mouth lands differently than Goldilocks does. Goldilocks is the fantasy, the distance, the thing he calls me when he wants to keep me at arm's length. Harvee is the problem. The weight of the actual situation pressing in.
The leaky pipe counts time in the corner. Drip. Drip. Drip. The air is thick with dust and the faint chemical smell of a place that doesn't see much light. The concrete walls have no give,no softness, nothing that belongs in the same world as what's happening between us in here.
Which is exactly what makes it so disorienting.
Back in Tennessee, fear was always cold. Hopeless. Dead-end jobs and shitty men and hands that grabbed where they shouldn't and no clear way out. Fear there felt like a ceiling pressing down.
Here it feels like a current.
"What if we made it a game anyway?" I hear myself say.
He laughs, low and disbelieving. "You like this?"
"I told you. I'm not a good guy." He says it again, harder this time. My name instead of a caress. A line in the concrete.
He picks up the remote and clicks on the ancient TV — the one he dragged in for me earlier, which is a detail I keep coming back to without meaning to — and some early 2000s rom-com menu blooms onto the screen, music looping cheerfully off the walls.
"I have to go for a bit," he says, already turning. "You good?"
He doesn't wait for the answer. The door slams. The lock clicks. The menu music keeps looping.
I test the chains first. Same result as every other time — solid, unforgiving, nothing giving at the ankle attachment to the couch frame. I try angling my foot differently. Nothing.
Then I make myself think.
He says it's not a game. But he left the room after licking blood off my chest because he couldn't trust his own hands. He adjusts his expression constantly, tightens his jaw, controls his eyes, works very hard at a composure that keeps almost failing. He is not as in control as he performs.
That is still leverage. Whatever the plan evolves into, that's still something.
I scan the room in slow methodical sweeps, as much of it as the chain allows. Concrete walls. Bare bulb overhead. The TV on a wheeled cart. Dented metal table with the burrito wrapper and a Styrofoam cup. The door, heavy and industrial, deadbolted. The dripping pipe in the corner feeding into a corroded bucket, mold spreading dark at the base of the wall beneath it.
I close my eyes.
Breathe in. Out. In.
I let myself find Donna's smile over her computer screen when I'd forward her something stupid. Melanie's laugh at Freddy's, the way she'd called meHarv with two E'slike we'd known each other for years. The smell of fresh coffee and warm chocolate.
I open my eyes. Look at the concrete ceiling.
I am not just a girl chained up in a storage unit. I am Harvee Holland, and I have survived things that would have folded other people in half, and I am not done yet.
I sink back into the awful couch and let the menu music loop and think.
CHAPTER 27
DIEGO