Into the unknown

Chapter 11.

It had been a few days since the whole incident in the dining room. I wasn't sure exactly how many days it had been because I had kept the curtains closed, stopping any source of light from entering the room. I had just been sat in the bed, my knees tucked into my chest and my arms wrapped around my legs. The only time I had moved from this position was when I needed to go to the toilet.

Cristian came into the room numerous times, with a friendly smile on his face and food in his hands, but I turned it all down with a simple shake of my head. I didn't even speak to him, I couldn't find the words or energy to speak. Each time he came into the room, the worry and concern on his face seemed to increase and he looked more and more stressed. However, that didn't affect his clothes; he was still donned out in extravagant and unique suits that showed off the kind of person he was.

I hadn't eaten, drank, or slept since the whole thing with Valentino happened. Every time I tried to force myself to sleep, my spinning mind would keep me awake, to the point where I didn't even attempt to sleep anymore. My eyes just stayed glued onto the wall in front of me. I was surprised I hadn't burnt holes though it yet!

I felt a constant sickness in the pit of my stomach, but there was nothing in there for me to throw up. Every so often, I got a tingling feeling in my chest. At first, I wasn't too sure what the feeling was. However, the more I thought about it and felt it, the more I was convinced that it was a mixture of feeling empty, lonely and sad. On the plus side, my hand no longer required a bandage as the wounds had fully closed up, only leaving a trail of dark coloured lines on my palm.

As for eating and drinking, I didn't want to accept anything that would put me in debt to Valentino and extend my time here. It was a simple tactic to try and put this all behind me as soon as possible. But with each passing moment, it felt as though I was never going to get out of here. The time I had spent in this room helped me make some sense of what happened that night. I think I must have had some kind of out of body experience, in which I imagined Darren being there and the fire that never came. I tried to convince myself that Valentino's outburst was all in my imagination too, but I knew all too well that it actually happened and every time his angry face came into my mind, a shudder rippled through my body.

I tried to figure out my life after this. If I didn't find another job soon, I would be stuck with mum and Darren forever, and that shook me to my core. The truth was that I wouldn't live for much longer if I had to stay there. The torture that Darren inflicted on me had become worse as I got older, assumingly he thought I could tolerate more pain, but that was far from the truth. If anything, it hurt more, maybe not in the physical sense, but in the mental sense. He was slowly killing me, and I understood that now.

My eyes widened as I stared at the wallpaper on the wall in front of me. The printed vertical lines, that ran from the top of the wall and ended half way down. looked as though they were moving apart, as if to create a space or a tunnel for me to walk through. At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me but as I lent my body forward, over my knees, trying to get a closer look at what was happening, I saw the gap getting bigger and bigger, until it was unmissable.

A smile formed on my lips, as I saw my mother's youthful and beautiful face, the one I remembered from when I was around five or six. Her long brown hair, that she would often straighten, would fall round her face, her full fringe resting just above her eyebrows. She had the same chocolate-coloured eyes as I had, something I was very happy to inherit from her. Truth be told, my mother was a beautiful woman and I was lucky to have been blessed with her genes.

My childhood consisted of some of the happiest times of my life. Mum and I would regularly go to the park or play with my princess dolls when I would come home from school. The memories I had of my mother was not the woman she was now. She was a stranger, someone who I no longer knew.