The Great Below

The Interrogation

Octavia had spent the night drifting in and out, fighting off the chill and discomfort by focusing on a missing chunk of concrete in the wall opposite her. It was, perhaps, the extreme version of waiting in a doctor's office: an uncomfortable chair, bare surroundings, and in this case she waited to have her health threatened rather than improved. When she needed a distraction, she stared at the missing chunk of wall – like an explosion of chalk dust – and tried to create snippets of fictional backstory for it. No matter how many times she rewrote it in her head, she always settled on it being a bullet hole, and she always imagined it passing through the last person who sat in her garage-sale chair.

On the wall to her left was a long steel table on wheels; the wall to her right was almost entirely mirror. Her doppelganger sat there, looking worn out and helpless. Dominic arrived after what felt like hours but couldn't be confirmed, with something heavy in his arms. He was unshaven and wore a fresh suit, and Octavia rocked against the seat while he plugged in the device. He placed it on the steel table before wheeling it over. Her arms had fallen asleep from being stuck in place for so long and she moved with the hope of alleviating the incessant tingling.

"I had a hard time sleeping last night, thanks to you," Dominic said. Nick arrived at the door with another chair that Dominic placed opposite her, the table between them. On it was a hot plate. He turned the knob to high and the electric coils hummed to life, beginning their lazy transition from black to orange. "I assume your night was similar."

"I thought you offered me a job?" she asked.

"You'll have your job when I'm satisfied." He unbuttoned his dress jacket and took a seat.

"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have shot you." And though she was still smarting from the slap she'd received, she told the truth. Just because he'd implied that he wanted to sleep with her, and that he amassed girlfriends only by means of men in vans with cable ties, she couldn't have been capable of murdering him. There was sizable moral gap between pervert and killer. How could she explain to him that she had been thinking like Victor in order to survive?

"Do you like violence, Octavia?" he asked. "I wonder. Tell me about yourself."

There was no backing away, stuck as she was in her seat, but she stretched the limits of the chair-back anyway. "I've had a string of bad luck lately," she began, and then she had trouble looking away as the coils burned brighter. Some old residue – charred and gummy and black – began to smoke. "But I don't like violence."

"You understand it, though." Dominic nodded to Nick, who came inside and closed the door behind him. Dominic reached in a pants pocket and offered Nick a pocket knife, which he then used to split the bonds at her wrists. The plastic drifted to the ground, but she was still reluctant to move her arms. "I saw you had some burns on your hands. May I take a look at them?"

Color wavered over the hot plate like asphalt on a summer day. "I showed them to the doctor already," she said in a small voice.

"I know. And now I'm asking you to show them to me."

Slowly, she put her hands up with her palms toward him. It was a gesture that doubled as surrendering.

"Closer," he said.

She pushed them forward by no more than an inch, flexing her fingertips back. Her skin pulled, too tight.

Dominic clicked his tongue. "I want you to put yourself in my shoes, Octavia. I am the leader of roughly two dozen men down here. I run a lucrative business. One of the things that keeps my operation running is my reputation, both with my staff and my clients. They respect me because I do as I say, and I take what I want. So when your fiancé made this deal with me, claiming that it was critical he bring you along, I accepted and here you are. I did what I said. And when I decided that I wanted you for myself, you became mine. But when you brought a gun into my room and threatened my life to forward your own agenda, you called my reputation into question. Can I still do as I said? Have I still gotten what I wanted? Now, I'm not such a bastard that I would take your life for what you did. I could, of course. I could have Nick do it right now."