Undercover

28. What is that?

Natalia's P.O.V.

I woke up under a blanket, which confused the hell out of me. For a minute there, I thought I was back home, under the warmth of my blanket. But the surface beneath me was not soft. The surface beneath me was hard, indicating that I was not home, but in the same place I had been in yesterday. I honestly didn't know what day it was. I could never really tell if it was day or night. Like I said, there was little to no light entering the space that I had occupied for quite some time.

I tried to sit up, but moving a finger caused me greater pain than I thought it could. I didn't understand how someone could be so cruel. This guy takes having a bad day to a whole other level. I knew my sense of time wasn't reliable, but I could feel my weight shedding off. That does not happen over a day or two. It wasn't like he starved me to death. Curiously, food was something that he gave me every day. The real struggle with that was being able to eat it. Come to think of it, that was something that never made sense to me. You'd think that if you're going to be torturing someone, you wouldn't give them food. That would, I imagine, make the torture worse. Not only would you be beaten and in pain, you'd be hungry too, which is also adding to the pain. He only gave me enough to live off of. I ate a bit of it, but my paranoia over whether I was going to die through poisoning was always what stopped me. Hence, the losing weight. Granted, if he had poisoned the food, I wouldn't be alive right now. But that didn't make it any better.

I didn't want to be here anymore. I wanted to be away from this man. I was a prisoner here, and it seemed that his anxiety only grew. He was getting angrier with just the smallest thing and it felt like he was always irritated. There were times when he looked at me and I could almost see the desire to kill me in his eyes. I didn't know when he was actually going to break, and that scared the crap out of me. It seemed like I was safe for now, but with him you seriously never knew. There were times where even a look was enough reason for him to come and attack me. He was growing more and more anxious. It did not take a genius to know that it wasn't going to be very long until he did actually kill me.

He came in to leave me some food. There was something different about him today. This only reminded of Cayden's behavior right before he would be mean to me when we were kids. It was as if he was making sure that there was something good to remember when he did the bad. And now, with Daniels, this had been the fourth thing that he had done for me. Let me tell you, I know that it's weird to keep track but there was always a pattern. Usually, on a good day, the most "good" things he did for me averaged to about two. On a bad day, like I'm sure this one was going to be, it would go up to about six. We were already at four and there was something telling me that my gut was right. On those days, I tried to keep quiet and not make eye contact, but it seemed to me that even those things angered him. With him, I couldn't win. He tortured me for lack of action and for action as well. He made no sense and I grew to be extremely cautious but even then, it was never enough. I always angered him. It wouldn't matter to me so much if my life didn't depend on it. But I was scared of even turning my head to look behind me.

So back to the food...I stared hesitantly at it. Because I knew that I could get a punishment both ways. I could get a beating for eating it or avoiding it. I was scared half to death at this point. Not like I hadn't been scared to death at the beginning but the fear was more apparent now. It was tagging along with me everywhere I went. It was at my heels waiting to overcome me in every single way that it could. And it didn't help that he would always justify that fear. I hoped that Aiden was getting somewhere. I know that I could probably take my phone out at this point, but I was too scared. His actions were becoming more and more unpredictable. He would come and check in on me when I thought he wouldn't, and then when I thought he wasn't going to come in, he did. There were times that I didn't even see his hits coming at me. If he saw a phone on me, I know for sure that he would kill me. Besides, I doubt that it had any battery left. It had probably already died.