A Pirate's Life For Me

Why?

Again I scream.

"What's wrong, child?" Rosalette asks softly, stepping forward and smirking, trailing her red fingers across my shivering chin. "Does that hurt?"

Shaking too bad to talk, I concentrate on huffing in breaths and simply stare back, pleading with my eyes for her to stop.

She sighs. "I thought we went over this already."

Her hand tightens over mine, moving to the third finger, bending it slowly sideways until the third knuckle snaps violently to the side. She laughs over my scream. "Answer me when I talk to you."

Shorty walks in before I can recover.

"Enough, Rosalette. Leave him be for the moment. He can't possibly concentrate if you continue to break our incentive."

I force my head to turn to the side, jerking with the exertion of holding my arms in place, chained high above my head, but I can't even focus on the blur walking slowly towards me. The world swims slowly in and out of focus, never staying too long on one extreme, preferring to sail aimlessly over the spectrum instead, filling my head full of cotton as I attempt to focus on something other than the astounding pain in my right hand.

"F-Finally d-decided to sh-show up, d-did you?" I smirk, pretending that I'm not literally shaking in my boots.

He smiles in return. "Oh, I see your stutter has returned. Afraid, are we?"

I feel my emotions flicker across my face, and before I can remedy my mistake his face rockets into mine. "Good."

His breath smells like vanilla.

"S-So, w-we've covered wh-where I'm n-not, b-but w-we haven't q-quite c-covered why I'm h-here." I swallow, almost choking on my spit with the incessant jerking of the overused muscles in my arms, turning my head to follow him as he walks in front of me. "H-How l-long have I a-actually b-been here?"

"Two days."

I start. Two days? I've been locked up in here for two days? 48 hours, and they only started bothering me ten minutes ago?

But even as my incredulity builds, my stomach drops. I know exactly why.

And this means I'm in even more trouble than I thought.

"As for why you're here, you'll learn soon enough."

I listen to the click of his boots as he stalks behind me.

Click.

Click.

Click.

"H-How 'bout n-now?"

Click.

Click.

He stops.

Rosalette shifts her weight to my right, petting the black feathers on her boa, softly tapping the toe of her knee-length boots on the cement floor.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap...

Dead silence from behind me, dead silence from the rest of the room, except for her tapping, her shoe against the floor.

My heart-rate picks up easy, pounding in my ears, founding the backdrop of my lungs as they heave in breath after breath, sweat building behind my ears and dripping across the bridge of my nose.

It's mental. It's all mental. I know that, and still, I'm drowning.

"I know what you're doing!" I shout, my voice exploding from the pent-up anxiety inside me, much, much louder than I thought it would be. I listen to my voice echo around the walls. "I-I know what you're trying to do!"