Atlas
My body has been cavernous for an immeasurable amount of time. I've become unable to distinguish between real life and dreams. Spots have dotted my vision for minutes and minutes and minutes and hours and hours and hours. My body floats in and out of consciousness like waves at the bay of a sea.
Anxiety tears up my mind, and as more and more time passes, my dreams are tainted with images of bags of white powder and needles filled with amber.
All I've been able to think about is how nice a shot of heroin would be. But there's no way for me to access that.
Maxim has been appearing every now and then. I'm never expecting it. It just happens. He's...there. And then, he's not. He's also in my dreams. Sometimes I imagine him taking a knife to Caspian and Roman, cutting them up into little tiny pieces. Other times I imagine him trapping my sweet girl in a headlock and gripping her arm to inject that awful drug into her clean veins.
When Maxim visits, he usually just pulls his knife out and drags the tip along my dirtied skin. Not actually nicking me, but close enough to make every hair on my body stand up. I think he likes the mental torture more than the physical. He says that the human brain is a fickle thing. That his options are never-ending. He says that he spends his waking hours working and deciding how best to break me.
And I have to admit, he's tried nearly everything.
He's brought in various guards from around this place and told them to have their fun. In response, they took a knife and cut my face, slicing from the top of my cheekbones, where my temples end, and down to the apples of my cheeks, deep enough to scar. When they finished cutting me, they put their knives away and used their hands to smear the blood dripping from the cuts down my face and onto my neck.
They had no trouble digging their knives into my palms, squeezing the blood onto their own hands, and dragging their hands across my torso, creating racetracks of red.
Some time later, they left, and all I had the capacity to do was flutter my eyes closed and drift into a dark, cold pool of misery.
~~~~~
Gwendolyn
Of all the faces that could have showed up in our interim kitchen, Damien's was definitely...unexpected.
So many thoughts raced through my mind. How are you here? Why are you here? What about Kieran? What does Mrs. Jett know, if anything?
"Gwendolyn," he said, pulling me back to reality. "Kieran's told me a lot about you."
"I-is he okay?" I asked him, almost feeling bad that he's stuck in his house with no plausible escape.
Damien's breath caught, and I noticed the distant and hurt look swirling his bark-colored eyes.
"I--he's fine. I had to leave him at his home with no knowledge of my departure." Something about the way he spoke was eerily formal, almost like he had walls upon walls upon walls up. Which I guessed made sense, since he was Kieran's personal bodyguard...and recent lover.
"Why didn't you mention that you were leaving?" By now, I'd nearly forgotten that we were meant to be settling for dinner, too enraptured by Damien's sudden appearance to sit down for a civil meal of homemade chili.
"It was too risky," he explained. "I handed in a leave notice to Mrs. Jett and told her I was quitting, before leaving the estate and coming straight here." He cleared his throat once. "I left Kieran there. I figure once everything blows over, I can go back and get him." His eyes shifted to the ground, and I could tell he felt guilty for his actions, even though he'd hardly done anything wrong in the first place.
YOU ARE READING
My Devoted Demons
Romance"Um, hi," I say, my voice quivering under their gazes. "Hello, little one," the leader -- Caspian -- says. "I think we're going to have a lot of fun, don't you?" ~~~~~ When Gwendolyn Sage waltzed into Whitmore Academy, she didn't expect her dorm to...
