1
LIANA
Cold. I’m so fucking cold. Freezing, actually.
Reaching for my covers, wanting to pull them up, I realize I can’t. I tap around, and the single movement tells me exactly why.
Not only is there no blanket, but there is no bed. There is no nothing.
Fluttering my eyes open, I find nothing but darkness around me. Distant clinking of the metal becomes clearer and clearer by the second as I wake up, realizing that the sound is coming from me. More precisely, from every small movement I make.
Bleary and confused, I look around the shadow-swallowed space before looking down, noticing cold, heavy bands around my wrists. My arms lay flat by my sides, and when I try to move them, a realization dawns on me: I’m chained up.
To test my theory, I shake my heavy arms and the chains clatter on the ground once more, one chain leading to either side of me and, judging by the sound, they’re tethered to the floor far enough from me not to be able to reach them. There is no point shouting either, seeing how my mouth is taped shut to stop me from doing so. Moving my legs doesn’t do me any better either. My ankles are a prisoner of chains, too, rendering me completely immobile, yet giving me enough “freedom” to shuffle and shift positions.
I sigh through my nose and let my head fall back against the floor with a thud, staring up at the darkness at what I assume is the ceiling.
Fear, panic, dread. Those are what I’m supposed to be feeling. I’m in an unknown place, I have no idea how I got to where I am or who took me, and I am chained to the floor. But none of those feelings are emerging.
I wish I could say that I’m panicking. I wish I could say that I’m afraid and that I’ll cry or fight. I wish I could say that I care about what happens to me... but I can’t. Because I don’t.
I genuinely do not care.
For a long while now, I hadn’t cared. Not much bothers me. Not much makes me happy, either. There are days when I feel more like an inanimate object than a person. I feel... empty. Like there’s nothing going on inside wherever the feelings should be. Like there’s no one inside of this shell that is my body.
All the feelings that I have are just... dampened. The bad ones are usually more potent. I do get scared and worried. I do get anxious. I feel those the strongest. Especially the feeling of being lost. Sometimes it feels like I’m watching from the outside of my own body, and I flit through emotions too fast to grab onto them. Like I’m watching something at 4x speed, and can’t quite catch the meaning behind it. But it’s the good ones that are almost fully lost.
Those small moments of joy I have fade quickly under the thoughts of how everything is pointless because I’ll die one day, and those moments won’t matter. It’s like with every joyful feeling, a bad one comes attached to it to lessen the effect. If I feel genuine happiness, some part of me wakes up and decides to smother it, as if my brain is telling me that I have no right to feel it. As if it’s just a fleeting one that I have no reason to hold on to. More often than not, I fear being happy because for every good thing that happens, something bad follows.
Therefore, this moment doesn’t matter either. Nothing about this situation matters. Maybe whoever took me will finally put me to rest, and I won’t have to bother with trying to live anymore. It’s just too much work trying to dig myself out of stupor day in and day out with no success.
It does scare me how unbothered I am at times, but I guess it’s good right about now. I mean, I’m obviously kidnapped or whatever, so staying calm is a good thing, right? I might be saved, and I might not, but panic won’t help either way.
With that in mind, it doesn’t mean I appreciate being chained to this hard, cold, shit floor. Whoever did it could have at least put me on a bed or something.
As I lie awake, I try to pick apart any little detail that could tell me how I got to where I am. The last thing I remember is going to sleep after drinking my hot chocolate. But there’s no chocolate or bed right now. There is nothing to see as it’s pure darkness, and even with my eyes used to it by now, there is nothing to see.
There are also no sounds besides my own breathing and the chains as I move about. The ground is hard concrete, and the space smells like what I imagine a cave would. Almost metallic. Maybe due to cold, maybe due to concrete ground, or maybe it’s the chains. At least there is no stench of mold, so it can only mean this place is well kept, if that’s something that can be said about basements.
My eternal confusion lasts for a long while. Long enough that my eyes start closing with sleep, but just as I’m about to give into it, a sound of the lock clicking wakes me up.
Twisting as much as I can, I crane my neck towards the sounds, and my heart picks up speed as the lock clicks a few more times, then the door cracks open.
It opens so slowly and gently, almost to a frustrating level, but with it, some light pours into the room, illuminating enough to confirm my previous thoughts: This is a basement. Not that that’s my biggest concern.
I lie still as I watch a person walk over, each step sounding like a gunshot in the silence. It’s obviously a man, based on his height and walk. Dark clothes cover him, with the baggy hoodie swallowing his upper body.
He stops in front of me and stares down, but I can’t see his face. The hood covers it and drowns it in shadows, and the only thing I can see is a burning tip of the cigarette hanging from his lips.
There’s a slight crack of his knees as he crouches in front of me, and I watch as he takes a long drag from the cigarette, then pulls it out of his mouth and lets the smoke slowly vacate his lips in misty swirls.
With that sharp drag, the cigarette lit enough for me to catch a glimpse of his face.
His eyes are narrow and catlike. His cheeks are slightly rounded, but with a strong jawline. His brows are straight, with one cut in half, seemingly on purpose. And his lips are slightly on the thinner side, slightly parted as the smoke trickles out.
But that’s all he does. Stares. So I stare back.
He pulls another drag from the cigarette and lets it out.
“You are alarmingly calm,” he says, his voice so deep that it feels like it’s vibrating off my bones, the gravely feel to it making me think he just woke up.
“Would you prefer if I screamed?” Is what I want to ask, but the tape only makes me mumble an intangible hum.
“Let’s make a deal. I’ll take that tape off, but if you scream, I will knock you out. Sounds good?”
I roll my eyes. As if I have the patience to scream. Or point. Who the fuck would hear me?
He reaches over and takes hold of the edge of the tape, and with no remorse, he pulls it off with one swift tug. It feels like he pulls off a layer of my skin. He definitely takes off a few pieces of my lip skin, based on the stinging and slight taste of blood as I lick them.
“That was uncalled for,” I complain, my voice slightly hoarse from thirst.
He reaches and swipes his thumb across my bottom lip. “You’re bleeding.”
“Because you waxed my lips,” I hiss at him, jerking back from his touch.
“I would say I’m sorry but... I don’t really fucking care, do I?” He sighs.
“Well, mister I don’t really fucking care, mind telling me why I’m chained to the floor?”
He sits down, spreading his bent legs and leaning his elbows on his knees. “So you don’t run,” he answers matter-of-factly.
“Let me rephrase that. What is going on? Where the hell am I?”
I have a million questions, but these are the most basic ones.
“Kidnapping. Basement.”
I have a massive urge to headbutt him because of his flat, sassy answers. But even if they are flat and shitty, they’re still answers.
“Right,” I mutter. “Can you kidnap me to a more comfortable surface? Because sleeping on the floor is not doing any good for my back. Not to mention the chains. Also, I really need to pee.”
He pulls another smoke, then tilts his head at me. “What makes you think that I care about your comfort or your bladder?”
“Considering you tied me to a basement floor, nothing,” I argue. “That doesn’t mean I won’t pee on your precious floor and all over myself, and then the place will stink, and I will stink, and no one wants that.”
“Have you been kidnapped before?” He asks, completely ignoring my needs.
“No. You’re the first one. Congratulations,” I make a little unenthusiastic woohoo sound, rolling my eyes in annoyance.
He lets out a small scoff, and based on his bright personality, I believe that is classified as a laugh.
“Do you even know why you’ve been kidnapped?” he asks, curiosity lacing his voice.
“No, but I would love to be enlightened.”
He falls into another silence as he finishes his cigarette and puts it out on the ground. “You are extremely ballsy for someone in your position. Do you understand the fact that your life is in danger?”
“I barely sleep. I keep forgetting to eat most days. I do not take care of my health at all. I trip and run into everything around me, and I have a serious caffeine addiction. I’m a danger to myself. If you don’t kill me, I’ll die from hunger or a heart attack anyway. Or maybe I’ll trip and break my neck. So why don’t you skip the whole threat part—because I truly don’t care—and tell me why I’m here?”
“Have you considered therapy?” he returns after a few moments.
Sighing, I roll my eyes and tell him in the flattest tone, “First place I’ll go when I’m out of here.”
Therapy. Right. Because I need to sit in a room with a stranger and tell him all about my problems, while they pretend to listen and write notes, when they’re actually drawing doodles and daydreaming about a vacation.
I can do that myself. Plus, therapy is for those who don’t know what their problem is. I am fully aware of mine, only there’s nothing I can do about it. I should know. I fucking tried.
“Who says you’re coming out of here?” he asks, and there’s a hint of humour in his voice.
“Well, if you’re gonna kill me, kill me somewhere more comfortable, please.”
“There is something seriously wrong with you,” he notes more seriously.
I let out a snort. “I learned to live with it. You can, too.”
A heavy sigh slips out of him as he gets off the ground, a deep hum of strain following as he straightens out and clicks his neck until the bones crunch.
With the movement, the hood slides off, and pitch black hair makes an appearance, strands of it falling nearly to his chin in layers.
The bit of light streaming through wherever he came from casts some vision on his face, and I can just about make out a single catlike eye before he’s back in the shadow and reaching for something in his pocket.
It’s hard to see what it is, but when the sound of tape being pulled cracks, I don’t wonder any longer. I just lie there helplessly as he crouches down and holds up a straight piece of tape in front of my face.
“Is that really necessary?” I ask.
But he doesn’t answer. He only slaps the piece of tape over my mouth, then slaps both my cheeks to make sure it sticks while I curse him out underneath it.
“There. Much better when you’re not yapping.” He sighs, and while I’m grumbling about him being an ass, he walks out, and the sound of a lock turning fills the space before it’s swallowed by silence and darkness.
