Vanity by Mary Martel

Author:Mary Martel [Martel, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Olliver

Wakey, Wakey

The bars clanked as one of the guards walked by and dragged the tip of his rifle across them. What used to terrify me had long stopped bringing out any emotion in me at all.

I felt nothing but emptiness inside. Which is all I'd felt for a very long time now.

"Wakey, wakey," the guard called out in a happy, deranged voice.

The people in this place derived far too much pleasure from the humiliation and pain of others.

Another thing that used to disgust me about this place that I'd long since let go of because I felt absolutely nothing.

"Take a shower. Get yourself cleaned up and presentable. You've got fifteen minutes until showtime. Then the boss wants you upstairs. You're earning your keep tonight."

The guard walked away, laughing like he always did, happy to know he was in for a show tonight and would be enjoying a taste of what he assumed to be my misery.

The joke was on him, because I wasn't miserable anymore. It took too much energy to give a shit and it never changed the outcome. Now, locking down my emotions and shutting everything off? That used to piss them off beyond reason, and for a while, having that reaction from them had made me happy. It didn't take long for the happiness and smugness to fade. Then I really did feel nothing at all—there was no facade, that was simply my new normal, and I chose to fully embrace it and didn't even try to fight against it.

I turned my back on the guard and walked the whole six feet over to the shower. It was a gym locker room style shower with knobs on the wall and a shower head sticking out of the wall. There were no curtains and absolutely no privacy whatsoever. The water went down a drain in the concrete floor that was in the center of the room I lived in.

Calling it a room was generous. It was a cell and there was a time, a long time ago before I decided to fight back the only way that worked, where it seemed like a bedroom despite the bars on one side of it. There were no windows and the three walls were made of concrete. The floor was concrete. And the other wall was made up entirely of bars, which was the side the one door was on. A door that was bars as well.

Since I slept naked because clothes were kept from me unless they were given to me when I was supposed to wear them, I didn't need to disrobe before turning on the shower.

I turned the water all the way on the hot side and left the cold side off.

Incredibly hot water hit me directly in the face and I just stood there with my face aimed up at the spray, taking it.

This was probably the best part of my day.

The water was so hot it burned every single part of me that it touched,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.