Home Ice.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Avery

A house with a backyard, a picket fence, friendly neighbors that I'm not allowed to speak too. If only they knew that the wife he tells them about isn't his wife and that once the curtains shut, her cheeks burn and her eyes run from the force behind his hand.

The room I'm in looks over the street, but the window is cemented shut so I can only look out it. The glass is nearly indestructible and there's nothing in here I could use to break it, anyway. I think it's a one way window too, because I banged and yelled and screamed for hours yesterday but even the people walking by with their dogs on leashes didn't hear or see me.

There's a bathroom connected, but the shower has no curtain just like the hinges have no door. Everything is open. He sees everything.

There's a wall covered in photos of me, of Finn and of Casey and Grace. They're from the last month or so, which tells me that he hasn't been around much longer than that. But still, seeing images of my family taped to a wall makes me sick to my stomach. And I really don't like the ones he has of Kennedy.

I think he has a job, or somewhere he goes for a few hours a day. He leaves by kissing me and saying he's "off to work," but I don't know what that really means. Those are the only hours I can cry, the only time I can let myself free my emotions. I play along the rest of the time.

I had bad morning sickness this morning and that told me that I am for sure pregnant. It gives me more ambition to get out of here, but I'm scared. I'm scared about what would happen if I'm here long enough for him to figure it out. He can't know. He can't hurt my baby.

This shouldn't be how I'm experiencing pregnancy. I should be with Finn, in his arms as he holds me through the nausea. I should feel his hands roaming my stomach, not Mason's roaming everywhere else.

Every time he lays a hand on me, all I can think about is the life growing in my tummy. I don't give a shit about how much his punches hurt, or the bruises that are wrapped around my neck and arms. I just don't want him to hurt my baby.

I don't know how much longer I can hold off him having sex with me, to put it bluntly. He's done other things, he's touched me for hours at a time and gotten himself off by making me sit on this bed naked. He's made me do things to him that have already torn my soul into a million pieces.

I feel hollow. I feel empty. I feel disgusting.

There's this crack in the plaster on the wall. I noticed it about an hour into being here and I've focused on it every time. I try so hard to dissociate but I just- it's hard. It's just hard.

The only thing he's given me, besides a slip dress that he won't let me take off, is a television. He lets me watch TV, how kind.

I don't think he thought about what I could watch though. He didn't think that Finn would stand in front of a sea of cameras pleading for help to find me. But that's what happened, I saw every second of it.

My first thought when I got the TV was to keep the news on in case they would publicize that I was missing, and that's exactly what they did. When I saw Jordan standing in front of everyone, I chose to believe that they're going to find me. They'll find me.

The camera panned over to my family and I instantly started sobbing. Grace looked like a wreck, her eye was bruised and she had a cut on her cheek. If she looks like after one hit, I can't imagine what I look like. I wouldn't know, there's no mirror in sight.

Casey looked worse than when he got stabbed and he wouldn't stop watching Finn. My Finn. He's as distraught as I thought he'd be, he's worse than anything I could have ever imagined.