Simon 'Ghost' Riley - The Spiders Web

9

Exhaustion wracking her body, she couldn't allow herself the privilege of sleep. If she did she would be choked, the sharp barbs stabbing her in the neck. Sometimes Ilyin liked to visit her to gloat in his own language, while she sat there stiff as a board, allowing herself the faintest of breaths in order to deal with the stinging pain.

Her fingers were numb and stiff, wrists and neck raw with pricks and barbs that dug away at her skin, constantly reopening the wounds no matter how little she tried to move. Dried blood and fresher blood clung to her skin like glue.

After those sixteen hours Ilyin enjoyed touching her. And he would do this knowing that she couldn't move, couldn't push him off or claw his eyes out with her nails like she wanted to. She was forced to let it happen while his men watched.

Everytime the door opened, dread would drown her until she was in a panic. It was torture in itself to keep her cries to a minimum.

Occasionally they would throw a bucket of ice cold water over her, shocking her from her delirium and half daze. She had not slept in so long, time was escaping her along with her hope of survival. Methods of ending her suffering ran through her mind the longer she spent tied up like a dog, knowing that Ilyin would not give her the privilege of death.

One time when he had his fun with her torment, she had spat her blood in his face. She had cursed him, then, in his own language and one of the few things she knew how to say so she knew he understood her.

His dark eyes had blackened, his hand wiping the spit and blood from his face, and he gestured to his men while barking an order.

Tina was untied from the pole and dragged back into the centre of the room, her hands immediately going up against herself to ensure her torn top covered her chest. She was left shivering against the floor with dull eyes, hair fallen in her face, her wrists raw.

The loose loop of the sharp wire hung around her neck and was wrenched up by the man behind her, yanking her head back. She grit her teeth, closing her eyes in pain as she strained to catch her breath.

Ilyin spoke to her in Russian again and she didn't respond, trying to focus her breathing. When all he got out of her was silence he nodded to his men.

They moved in on her instantly and she tensed, shying back on instinct but they grabbed her arms and forced her on her knees, her arms held by two men on either side ensuring she couldn't fight back or get away, forced to lean forwards until her face nearly slammed into the concrete. Another man lifted the back of her shirt so that her skin was on show and the cold air was biting as she trembled, unable to hide her shaking from them.

When he first dragged that knife through her flesh, all her mantra of staying quiet was thrown out the window.

She would thrash and strain against the mens hold, but the pain would blind her and suddenly she would be unable to move. Her skin was on fire, feeling like the blade was scraping bone as it raked its way down the sensitive skin on her back. Her throat was raw.

They spoke in words she couldn't decipher, her mind too scrambled, dazed. Some words poked through her barrier of recognition, but it was too fluent, to fast for her to comprehend.

Every flinch or tiny effort she made to put distance between herself and that knife, the grip on the wire around her throat twisted and the barbs cut into her skin even deeper.

Endlessly, she was cut into like a slab of meat on a butchers table until her screams and sobs turned barely audible, her voice crackling and fading like a fire in winter, a metallic taste at the back of her throat. Again and again, she was butchered and left to bleed out on the ice cold floor. Unable to pick herself up, lying in a pool of her own blood, the only warmth she had felt in such a long time that a delirious part of her almost craved it. Reopened and left unable to heal, the cold did little to numb the agony that wracked her body as she was forced back against that pole and restrained by the barbed wire again, this time only by her wrists. Exhaustion made her collapse on her side, arms wrenched back at an odd angle, skin tearing at the wrists and the pole against her slashed back pressing on her nerves, lighting them like sparks in a fire.

The cold seeped in through her clothes, through her skin until everything was numb. She had hoped the temperature would numb the pain but all it did was amplify it.

Eventually it got to the point she was left there for days on end, or so she had thought. She didn't really know, she just knew that it felt like forever. A couple of times she was surprised to wake up again, her shirt stuck to her back and her skin nearly stuck to the concrete floor from all of the blood coating her.

She wished for familiar voices, not the ones she had come to know recently, but the ones she had been taken from. She felt as though she was being forgotten deliberately, left to rot a painful end.

Eventually, Tina forced herself to move because if she didn't do it now, she wouldn't have the strength to even pick herself up off the floor, let alone fight or run. She had to do something.

With what little strength she had, the woman grit her teeth and after too long of trying to carefully escape the barbed restraints, she resorted to less appealing measures. In frustration, she pulled and twisted her arms until she tore her hand free, skin shredded down from her wrists to her knuckles in deep lines overlapping older wounds. When one hand was out she removed the other much easier and attempted to sit herself up.

Arms shaking, she felt warmth trickle down her forearm, coating her hand and exhaled shakily through the pain.

Tina had lost care for the torn skin, numb from the cold because she had to get out before she died.

The blinking dot in the corner stared back at her, taunting her, daring her to get up and approach that door.

It took a long time for her to actually do it. As she stood, wounds on her back reopened and she was left wrapping her arms around her midsection and slowly, cautiously heading for the door in an attempt to keep herself together through the agony.

When her Captain would ask her later on how she had got out, she would be silent; Tina Skeldon didn't remember.