Chapter Forty-Five

Loud, heavy, screaming metal music blasted through the ceiling speakers once again, sending Jennifer's body into another sudden-awake jolt, and immediately bringing back the final boss of headaches. Her terrified and already full-of-tears eyes shot open in a fright. Nothing made sense anymore. Her brain was too tired, her body too weak for her to be able to keep her grip on reality. Time had become nothing but a blur… an unreadable smudge on the fabric of her life, or whatever was left of it.

Jennifer had no real idea of how long it had been since Russell had drugged her that night at the restaurant before taking her captive. At first, she tried to keep track of time by relying on her body clock, which she knew was as precise as it could be. That precision came courtesy of sixteen years behind bars, when every single day was regimented down to the minute, forcing her body to grow so used to routine, it became an addiction.

Jennifer knew that no matter what, she would get hungry three times a day, because for sixteen years, she was only fed three times a day, and at the exact same time every single day, with very few exceptions. That meant that her stomach would first signal hunger at 6:30 a.m., then again at midday, and one last time at 6:30 p.m. – never before, never after. Those were three different internal alarms that seemed to have embedded themselves into her DNA. The fourth and final alarm came at ten o'clock at night – lights out – that was when her eyelids would show the first signs of becoming heavy.

What that all meant was that in normal circumstances, Jennifer didn't need a clock to be able to tell the time. Her body would give her a pretty good idea of what time of the day it was, but these weren't normal circumstances… far from it… because since she'd been taken, her body and mind had been deprived of four of the most important elements for survival.

Light – darkness surrounded Jennifer twenty-four hours a day, except when Russell was in the room with her. Every time that happened, Russell would use a different light intensity – from candlelight shadows to retina-melting bright – tricking and disorienting her visual cortex.

Food and water – both came at her captor's own discretion – sometimes once a day, sometimes not at all – causing havoc with her metabolism and keeping her energy levels at a bare minimum.

And finally sleep – rest had become a luxury that Jennifer could just about kill or die for. Russell would keep her awake either by blasting fast, screaming, metal music at her for as long as twenty hours a day, or by surprising Jennifer with a jet of freezing water that would keep her clothes wet and her shivering for hours.

And that was how a military wear-down tactic called ‘destructive conditioning of morale' worked, because despite feeling exhausted… despite getting just three hours of sleep in the past thirty, Jennifer was actually grateful that this time she had been awoken by loud music instead of freezing water. On ‘freezing water' days, she would always wake up locked inside a five-foot by five-foot animal cage – no space to stand up, no space to move around, no space to extend her legs. When ear-piercing, shrieking metal music was used, Jennifer would wake up inside a solid concrete-walled room. Still a prison cell, but at least she could stretch her legs.

And stretch her legs was exactly what she did, but without standing up. She felt too tired… her legs too weak to support even her measly 120 pounds. But even if her legs could hold her weight, she wouldn't be able to stand up because by now, the soles of her feet were nothing but raw flesh – another weapon in Russell's torture arsenal. Every day, at least once a day, he would tie her down and spank the soles of her feet with a long and thin bamboo cane until they bled. The pain was excruciating, but Jennifer wasn't tied down, which meant that she wasn't getting her feet tortured again… at least not for now.

She slowly forced herself into a sitting position and rested her back against the concrete wall. Reflexively, her skin-and-bone hands moved to the side of her head and rested over her ears, but it made no difference. The music was so loud that she could feel her ribcage and sternum rattling inside her.

Then, just like that, the room went eerily silent. Jennifer felt so disoriented, she couldn't even tell if the loud music had been playing for five minutes, or five hours. She opened her eyes and they instinctively tried to sweep the room, moving from left to right, but there was no light anywhere. All that surrounded her was darkness and stale air. She didn't want to cry anymore, but tears were already gathering around the lower rims of her eyes, threatening to spill out at any second, because deep inside, Jennifer knew that she was never getting out of that room. At least not alive. She knew that there was no one coming for her, but worst of all, she knew that she would never see her daughter again and that she would never be able to tell her how sorry she was for all the mistakes she'd made.

Despite all the horrors that came with sixteen years of prison, it was right there, sitting alone with her back against the wall of a pitch-black, godforsaken torture room, that Jennifer finally lost all hope. She didn't want to fight anymore.

‘Please…' she said to no one, her voice shaky and barely audible. ‘Just kill me and be done with this.'

‘What do you think he's doing?' a voice asked from one of the dark corners of the room.

‘ARGH!' Jennifer screamed, her skeleton practically jumping out of her skin. She pressed her spine tighter against the wall behind her.

‘He is killing you. He's just doing it slowly.'

Those words crawled along Jennifer's skin, sticking to the sweat that had slicked into the grooves of her palms, and slipping into her nostrils as they flared with her uneven breathing. It wasn't the fact that she wasn't alone in that room that had most disturbed her. It was the fact that the voice that had replied to her plea didn't belong to Russell.

It belonged to a woman.