The Nightmare Daze

19. Alone, Together

Florence

It's the waiting that's killing me. It's sitting on this bed, watching him drink himself into a rage, that will be the actual death of me. Levi is watching me too, eyes growing red as the evening stretches long and he nears the bottom of the whiskey bottle that he retrieved from his desk.

Levi has a desk. His room is tidy to a fault—not barren, but intentionally free of clutter. The blanket is stretched taught across the mattress and tucked beneath it, only my weight disturbing it. And there is the desk, an old hand-carved desk with eight drawers, the kind I'd expect to see in the study of a wealthy merchant, not a man like him. There are no books or paper near it—I'm fairly certain that if Levi can read it's very little—but each drawer is carefully arranged to contain his few personal possessions, including two bottles of whiskey, a few crudely carved figurines, and a bible that looks as untouched as every other part of this room.

I pray that Levi keeps drinking into his second bottle and simply passes out before he has a chance to beat me. I don't think he cares that I'm already in a sorry state, and I think he's been imagining the ways he would drive fear into me from the moment I fell off that bridge.

"Do you live here?"

"Yes."

This really is his room. I'm just another one of his belongings now.

"For how long?"

"Ten years."

Ten years living in this room. Ten years relying on the food and shelter of a man who orders him to kidnap or kill people for his bread. I would feel pity for him if I thought he minded the work.

"Do you—"

"Shut up," he snarls, slamming the nearly empty bottle down onto his desk. "I know what you're doing, Florence, and I don't care for it." I stare down at the blanket and run my fingers over it while he glares at me. "You're going to pay for what you did."

"You can't blame me for running," I whisper.

"Oh, but I do."

"What would you have me do?"

"You know what I want from you."

I don't expect the tears to well up like they do. "I don't, I really don't."

"Then you're going to have a very hard time adjusting."

I wonder which part of raping me appeals to him, if it's the act of forcing himself on me that makes him want me, or if it's simply that he doesn't know how to achieve intimacy otherwise. He isn't a bad looking man, but perhaps there was never a point when his soul was less rotten than it was now.

"Have there been others?" I regret the question as soon as it leaves my mouth. I don't want to know if I'm following the same path as others. I don't want to know if there's something about me particularly that resulted in this fate. He's silent as he stares at me, and then he shakes his head in such a slow, deliberate movement that it turns my heart cold.

"And Elijah...does he keep women here?"

Levi stills and considers me, and then he smiles without a trace of humor. "That's enough out of you." He leans back, eyes still too piercing as they fall over me. "Do you understand where you are?"

"No...your headquarters, I assume."

"One of them. It's also home to a great deal of men in the company."

"Oh."

"Yes, Florence. 'Oh.' You realize what that means, don't you? How many of our friends your father is responsible for killing?" He stands, but I don't try to move from the bed. It doesn't matter what I do now; there is no defending myself from him except through words, and even then it isn't hopeful. "It could make up for some of it, if I gave you to them."