NO SAINTS HERE

CHAPTER SIX

RINA'S POV

It had been two days.

Two days since I last saw sunlight. Two days since I had any taste of the outside world. Two days since Reggie sat on that floor and watched them carry me out without saying a single word.

Two days since the beast put me in here.

I had screamed the first day.

Screamed until my throat burned and my voice came out scratchy and broken. Screamed hoping someone outside these walls would hear me. A neighbor. A passerby. Anyone.

Nobody came.

I stopped after that.

My voice was gone anyway. Completely used up. But even if it wasn't ,what was I screaming for exactly? What was I fighting for?

My job was gone. My freedom was gone. And Reggie, the man I had loved and paid bills for and cried over alone at night more times than I could count, had sat on that floor and watched them carry me out without moving a single muscle.

There was nothing left to fight for.

So I accepted it.

That's the thing about me. I never fight hard enough for myself. Never have. I see the door closing and instead of jamming my foot in it I just watch it shut. And then I find a way to survive whatever room I've been locked in.

This was just another room.

A basement this time. But still just a room.

There were no windows so I had no way of telling what time of day it was. Morning felt the same as midnight. The only thing letting me know time was passing at all was the chef woman who brought my food at what I assumed were regular intervals.

There were dim brown lights fixed into the ceiling. Warm enough to see by. Not warm enough to feel anything.

The bed was a single. Soft and surprisingly comfortable. I had expected a mattress on concrete. Maybe a rat or two for company. Instead the sheets were clean and the pillow was softer than I expected.

I didn't trust it.

Comfortable basements were suspicious.

On one side of the room there were shelves of books. Not a few. A lot. Dostoevsky. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Tolstoy. George Orwell. Toni Morrison. James Baldwin. Philosophy books with cracked spines that had clearly been read more than once. History books thick enough to use as weapons. And yes, tucked between everything else was some Shakespeare.

Shakespeare. Like the f**king Shakespeare. The god of literature.

I stared at those for a long time.

I didn't think someone like him would be into books. I pegged him as the type whose entire music taste consisted of gangster songs. Songs about carrying guns. Killing people. Being a f**king criminal. Not someone who sat down with Dostoevsky on a Friday night.

On the table beside the bed there were vinyl records. Stacked carefully in their sleeves.

Kate Bush. Fleetwood Mac. Joni Mitchell.

Old songs. Soft songs. The kind that belonged to a completely different world from the one he clearly lived in.

Not Kate Bush. Definitely not Kate Bush.

I picked one up and turned it over in my hands.

Nothing in this room matched the man who sent me to a basement for crying too loudly. Nothing matched at all.

Who the hell was this man.

I put the record back exactly where I found it. I didn't want to touch anything in here longer than necessary.

Then I saw the piano.

It was in the far corner half hidden in shadow. A full upright piano covered with a long cloth that had gone grey with dust. Not weeks of dust. Years of it. Nobody had touched this in a very long time.

I stared at it for a full day before my curiosity finally won.

I walked over slowly and lifted one corner of the cloth.

The wood underneath was dark and polished. Expensive once. The keys were yellowed slightly at the edges but otherwise intact.

I let the cloth fall back.

It was covered for a reason.

And whatever that reason was, it wasn't my business. I was already in this man's basement without permission. The least I could do was not go poking through his covered things too.

I went back to my bed.

The books kept me sane. I read everything I could reach just to stop my brain from going to the terrible places it kept wanting to go. Reading was the only escape I had from the reality that I was locked in a basement by a man whose name I barely knew.

The bathroom had no hot water.

I want to say I handled this with grace and dignity.

I did not.

The first shower I took I made a sound that probably went through every wall in this building. I genuinely considered whether being dirty was better than that. It was not. I adapted. I made the shower as fast as humanly possible and when I came out I felt like someone had kept me in a refrigerator for twenty minutes.

I reduced my showering from twice a day to once.

I had some standards left.

The chef, a woman in chef clothes who moved quietly and smiled genuinely brought food three times a day without fail. She was sweet. She brought me clothes and a blanket without me even asking. She made sure I ate properly.

I wanted to ask her about him.

Every time she came I had an entire conversation prepared in my head.

Who is he? Is there any chance he lets me go before something terrible happens?

And every single time she walked through that door my mouth just closed.

What if she dismisses me immediately.

What if she stops bringing food.

What if I offend her and she tells him and he comes down here and looks at me with those eyes again.

What if I die here slowly.

That last thought wasn't completely crazy because the mosquitoes in this basement were operating like the Russian army. Fully armed. Organized. Their sole mission was to bite and suck my blood and they were extremely committed to it. Half my body was already covered in red bumps and I was beginning to feel slightly off. A little warm. A little heavy.

I hated the mosquitoes.

And I hated him. The monster who put me here.

And I hated that the first thing I noticed when they brought me in here and he bent down to look at me was that he was the most terrifying and most attractive man I had ever seen in my life.

I know I shouldn't think that about my kidnapper.

But I'm just being honest. When I see a fine man I acknowledge that he's fine. That's my contribution to society. I can be kidnapped AND have eyes.

He was tall. Huge. Cold in a way that hit you before he even opened his mouth. And he clearly hated me which was completely fine because I hated him back and I didn't even know his name yet.

I didn't know what was going to happen next.

I could disappear in here and nobody would ever know.

Kayla must be losing her mind by now. Calling my phone over and over. Getting nothing. Showing up at my apartment. Finding it empty.

She would go to the police.

They would question Reggie. Reggie always cracked under pressure, that was one reliable thing about him. He would confess. They would find me.

They were going to find me.

I told myself that three times before I half believed it.

They were going to find me.

They had to.