I stumbled backwards from the shower cubicle, scared, horrified.
My head was humming incessantly. My heart thrashed against my ribs.
I knew that Sam had thirsted after research opportunities which had evaded him. I knew that he’d sometimes complained about his department at the university being too conservative for his tastes.
My terror spiralled as I thought of some of the books I’d seen in Sam’s study without ever thinking much about them. Books about brainwashing and coercive control; studies of torture victims and kidnap victims and prisoners who’d endured long-term incarceration.
Had Donovan seen them too, I wondered? Had he noticed them and logged them with his quick awareness, the same way he’d logged and remembered the storage cupboard in the attic?
If he really was an intelligence officer, had he seen something like this before on one of his tours of duty? Perhaps he’d joined the dots.
It didn’t seem impossible that he might have put things together when I was showing him around our home. Especially after I’d told him about my issues with the basement and he’d spent time down here, seeing the shower, maybe even the scratches on the brickwork. Particularly after I hadn’t been able to answer his questions about Oliver, or his party, or what had happened on that roof.
When I hadn’t known my own name.
That shook me on a whole new level – the totality of the damage Sam had wrought.
I’d been living with this man. Sleeping with this man. I—
I was staring at the DIY and decorating equipment in front of me, the sickly vibration growing more intense inside my head.
He’d had me do all the renovation work on his home.
Months and months of it.
I’d stripped his house back to a bare skeleton and remodelled it in the same way he’d broken me down and rebuilt me.
He must have waited to let me out until he could trust me. Until he’d conditioned me sufficiently.
And then he’d pretended he was helping me to cope with the trauma of a random attack that had never been random at all.
I clutched hold of my chest, wishing I could rip all the horror out of me, shuddering as I looked up towards the stairs, thinking of Donovan and Sam on the other side of that door.
Donovan had made a point of stressing to Sam that he was an excellent investigator before Sam had attacked him and I thought that now I understood why. He’d been taunting him. Letting him know what he’d pieced together.
Was that why Donovan had pushed me so hard? Had he wanted me to break through my conditioning and understand for myself, in front of Sam, what had been done to me?
Putting out my hand now, I reached for the handrail at the bottom of the stairs, gulping painfully as I craned my neck and stared up.
That was when I heard a sound from the other side of the door to the kitchen.
Four high and fast electronic chimes.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.