The Highest Bidder

❊ Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ Tʜɪʀᴛʏ﹣Sᴇᴠᴇɴ ❊

Trigger: Abuse

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• Evᥲ's POV •

My entire body felt like it was shutting down. My stomach wouldn't stop growling, which only seemed to make the pain worse. I wasn't sure how much time had passed since I was taken from Enzo. All I knew was it was far too long. I wanted to go back. No, I needed it. I didn't know how much longer I would last.

I shivered on the cold floor and looked through my swollen eyes. Maverick had used a bat and multiple other weapons to beat me senseless. He relished in the pain he caused me, chuckling whenever I made a sound of agony.

The room smelled of urine. I stopped getting up to go to the bucket he left for me, instead, just doing it where I laid on the floor. Moving hurt too much. I could barely even drink the water, let alone go to a bucket to pee.

The door opened and I didn't have to be able to see to know it was Maverick. He had been the only one to come into the room. No Vince. Never Vince.

"Tisk, tisk." Maverick knelt down before me, grinning. "You pissed on the floor again. Bad vixen."

I closed my swollen eyes.

"I guess you don't have enough strength to get into your submissive pose, huh," he mused. "How would you like some food? It's been over a week."

I didn't move, didn't speak. I still had a little bit of fight left in me. The water pushed off my hunger for a few minutes at a time, so I still had my mind about me.

My stomach gave me away, the growl forcing me to jerk slightly in pain. The sudden movement caused me to whimper.

"I'll bring you some soup," he said, as if he was doing me a huge favor. "You'll have time to force yourself up into your submissive pose. If I get in here and you are still laying there, you won't get your food."

He didn't wait for a response. He left me lying there in a drying puddle of my own urine. He expected me to be able to get up. And the only reason why I forced myself to my knees was the fact that I knew I needed food. Whatever it was, I had to eat it. It had been too long since I ate something.

Maverick had been wrong about it numbing after a while. If anything, the pain got worse. I wasn't getting used to being hungry.

I sat back on my heels and placed my hands palms-down on my knees just in time for Maverick to step back in. I could smell the food before I could see it, seeing as though it took more effort to open my eyes than it did to smell.

He brought in a mahogany chair and sat down in it. The sound of him stirring something brought my head up to look at him. It may have only been soup, but it was the first thing I would have had in over a week.

He spooned up some of the minestrone soup and blew on it as he eyed me. Then he held the spoon out to my lips and I opened them obediently, tensing under the sudden heat of the liquid. But I drank it greedily each time he brought it up to me.

It wasn't landing right in my stomach, but I didn't care. I needed the nutrients, even if I would end up throwing it up later. And the taste of it on my tongue overrode the thoughts of what would happen to it after an hour or so. Never in my life did I think that soup would taste as good as it did at that moment.

"What do you say?" Maverick set the empty bowl on the ground by his feet.

Fuck you, that's what I say.

"Thank you," I said instead. My stomach roiled with the amount of soup I had eaten, but I didn't care.

He hummed and ran his fingers through the knots in my hair. "I'll have someone come and clean up your mess. Then we're going to cut this hair off."

I narrowed my swollen eyes. "You'll do nothing of the sort."

He backhanded me, making me fall sideways to the floor. My head hit the cement and my ears rang upon impact. I curled into a tight ball, cradling my throbbing head and trying not to think about it. Thinking about the pain always made it that much worse.

Even though I protested, he did have someone come in to clean my urine off the floor and change out my water. And that someone was Vince.

I didn't even try to tell him how wrong it was that I was at Maverick's mercy. He could see it. Hell, he could probably smell it. But not only was he there to clean up my mess and restock my water, but he was also the one who was going to cut my hair. To say I didn't trust him with scissors near me was a massive understatement. If he was anything like Maverick, he'd do more with those things than just cut my hair.

But surprisingly, that's all he did. He cut my hair up above my shoulders and brushed it out silently. There was blood staining the hair that he cut off and I wondered how bad I actually looked. Then I wondered if he even cared.

He gathered up the hair and threw it in a trash can that he brought in with the scissors.

"This is what I deserve, huh," I croaked. "For presumably cheating on you?"

He turned towards me. "I didn't expect it to be this bad, I'll tell you that right now. No one deserves this."

"Then why are you allowing it to happen?" I licked my blood-coated lips and cringed at the taste. "You can't just help me escape?"

He eyed something at the far corner of the room. "No."

What was he looking at? Was the camera there?

"Did you ever love me at all, Vince?" I sat back against the concrete wall and curled into myself. "Or were you just using me?"

"I did love you." He nodded slowly. "Once. But then the doctor said that the baby wasn't mine and I just...I don't know. I believed him and I got pissed."

"And here we are."

He flinched. Visibly flinched at my words. That's how I knew he felt bad about what he had done to me. He couldn't help me because of the camera and because of what Maverick would do to him if he found out.

I closed my eyes and waited only a few seconds before I heard the sound of the door clicking shut, leaving me alone once again. I didn't mind it. I would rather have been alone than be beaten senseless or told that I did something that I truly didn't.

Glancing over at the section of the room where Vince had looked, I gave the area a small smile of reassurance, hoping that it would reach Enzo. I was still me. Maverick hadn't broken me. He cut my hair and beat me senseless whenever I did something he didn't like. But I didn't change.

Quite the contrary, actually. My old self was coming back. I was angry and hurting. I would allow it to build until it would explode, just like old times.

I closed my eyes and allowed myself the luxury of a few hours of sleep.