Corin Campbell tried to mentally project herself to a happy place. A meadow or a park or playing in the snow with Sammy on some early childhood vacation. Anywhere other than this cold, concrete chamber. She had completely lost perspective on how long she’d been here. Several weeks at least, but she supposed it could have been any amount of time. She could have been in this hell for days or weeks or only a matter of hours, and she wouldn’t have known the difference. Everything was relative. Pain could make seconds seem like hours, and pleasure could make days seem like a matter of a few moments.
She couldn’t say that her time here had been marked by nothing but pain. There was also the fear. Which she found to be even more soul-crushing than the pain. Corin had been in a constant state of fear and despair from the moment she had seen the man in the skull mask. Even when her tormentor wasn’t with her, she could feel his presence in the air pressing down on her, pushing inside her.
The only way she was able to mark time was by his visits to her lonely corner of hell.
She wondered if Blake would still want her after all this. Not because of the physical aspects; she didn’t doubt his understanding. But her mind was shattered in a way now that made her doubt she could even look at him the same. The world would never be bright and safe to her again. She would never be the petite brunette in love with life, the girl Blake had fallen for. Although, she supposed that the woman he had fallen for wasn’t truly the real her either.
Corin rolled over on her bare, sweat-stained mattress. Her legs shook with spasms of pain at the slight movement. That was another reason she doubted that she actually was in hell. She reasoned the genuine Satan would not feel the need to break the shins of his captives in order to ensure they couldn’t escape. That act itself inspired hope in a strange way. If her tormentor felt the need to cripple her, perhaps that meant help was within reach.
The thought had faded after the first days spent searching for weaknesses in her cell, pulling herself along the concrete floor, trying to find a way to escape or a weapon of any kind. She found neither. There was nothing her five-foot-four broken body could do against a man of his size and strength.
No way out and no way to resist.
He owned her. She was his property to use as he saw fit.
People would be looking for her, but she doubted they would make it in time to save anything of the college student and girl she had once been. That woman, that sister and lover and friend, seemed like a person she had dreamed up in another life. The tears, a mattress on the floor, and the rape of her mind, body, and soul seemed to be her whole existence now.
And she wasn’t the only resident of this hell.
She had heard doors opening. The muffled whimpering of other women as the devil chose to visit them. Trying to communicate, she had pressed her face to the door and yelled for someone to answer her. But the only reply had been the man in the skull mask shocking her with a cattle prod. The other girls, if she hadn’t simply imagined them, had apparently learned not to speak up.
Still, a small part of her former self had clung to life. A room inside her heart where she refused to succumb, where the girl with the genius-level IQ still listened and waited for a way to turn the tables on the devil himself.
Corin clenched her fists and thought of Blake and her sister. She thought of that other girl in that other life, the one who now hid somewhere deep inside her mind, struggling to stay alive and sane. She refused to let that girl die.
Long ago, she had heard of the concept of memory palaces, a technique which some used to retain vast amounts of information through internal visualization. Corin had constructed a memory palace of her own—not for the purposes of preserving memories, but for the purposes of preserving the girl who refused to die.
Separating herself from the cold darkness and the helplessness of her situation allowed her to, in essence, become two people. One who lay naked on a filthy mattress in an empty concrete cell, and one who lived in a bungalow the color of driftwood with steps leading to the beach. She tried to make that place her reality, stealing the details of the bungalow from a memory of the last family trip before her mother’s untimely death.
The strong woman inside her mind now stood at the railing of the vacation house’s deck, looking down at the beach, detached from the horrors of reality, ever thinking, ever plotting.
She wouldn’t die here. Instead, she would kill the devil himself.
She tried to maintain her cognitive distance and suppress fear and revulsion as she heard a key turn in her cell’s metal door. Imagining herself still in a place of sun and sand, she made mental notes of the number of seconds before the door closed again. His footfalls seemed to be louder than before. Normally, he entered her room naked, except for the skull mask, but now she heard the slap of leather on concrete. She dared not open her eyes or look at him, for fear of her mental barriers crumbling, allowing the despair of her reality to shatter what was left of her fragile defenses.
Corin had been naked since the moment she awoke, as if she was merely a piece of cattle or a sex toy built solely for his sick gratification. But now, something had changed. Instead of violating her, the devil threw a blanket over her bruised and shivering body and said, “Your blood tests came back. Congratulations, you’re going to be a mother.”
The barriers she had worked so hard to erect crumbled at those words.
At first, she didn’t comprehend the implications. She heard the devil’s footfalls retreating from the room as the full meaning of those words pierced her heart. Pregnant? She heard the door close as the man who called himself the Gladiator raped her again with this knowledge and left her to drown in her own hopelessness.
Corin Campbell wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Instead, she pushed down both urges and made up her mind that, at this point, survival had become a secondary concern. Her primary goal was now to murder the devil himself, even if it cost her own life.
Although, she supposed it wasn’t only her life she needed to consider now, but the life of her alleged child. She pulled the blanket close to her body, curled into a ball, and wept, dreaming of bungalows on the beach.