She is magically evasive.
“Maybe I could get a word or two out of you if I set you on fire. What do you think? Hmmm? A little lighter fluid on that golden hair—and whoosh!”
She does not blink.
“Or I’ll give you to the dogs, see if that unties your tongue.”
No flinch, no tic, no shudder. What a girl.
Mr. Vess stoops, lowering his face toward Ariel’s, until they are nose-to-nose.
Her eyes are now directly aligned with his—yet she is still not looking at him. She seems to peer through him, as if he is not a man of flesh and blood but a haunting spirit that she can’t quite detect. This isn’t merely the old trick of letting her eyes swim out of focus; it’s a ruse infinitely more clever than that, which he can’t understand at all.
Nose-to-nose with her, Vess whispers, “We’ll go to the meadow after midnight. I’ll bury Laura and the hitchhiker. Maybe I’ll put you into the ground with them and cover you up, three in one grave. Them dead and you alive. Would you speak then, Ariel? Would you say please? ”
No answer.
He waits.
Her breathing is low and even. He is so close to her that her exhalations are warm and steady against his lips, like promises of kisses to come.
She must feel his breath too.
She may be frightened of him and even repulsed by him, but she also finds him alluring. He has no doubt about this. Everyone is fascinated by bad boys.
He says, “Maybe there’ll be stars.”
Such a blueness in her eyes, such sparkling depths.
“Or even moonlight,” he whispers.
*
The steel cuffs on Chyna’s ankles were linked by a sturdy chain. A second and far longer chain, connected by a carabiner to the first, wound around the thick legs of the chair and around the stretcher bars between the legs, returned between her feet, encircled the big barrel that supported the round table, and connected again to the carabiner. The chains didn’t contain enough play to allow her to stand. Even if she’d been able to stand, she would have had to carry the chair on her back, and the restricting shape and the weight of it would have forced her to bend forward like a hunchbacked troll. And once standing, she could not have moved from the table to which she was tethered.
Her hands were cuffed in front of her. A chain was hooked into the shackle that encircled her right wrist. From there it led around her, wound between the back rails of the chair behind the tie-on pad, then to the shackle on her left wrist. This chain contained enough slack to allow her to rest her arms on the table if she wished.
She sat with her hands folded, leaning forward, staring at the red and swollen index finger on her right hand, waiting.
Her finger throbbed, and she had a headache, but her neck pain had subsided. She knew that it would return worse than ever in another twenty-four hours, like the delayed agony of severe whiplash.
Of course, if she was still alive in another twenty-four hours, neck pain would be the least of her worries.
The Doberman was no longer at the window. She had seen two at once on the lawn, padding back and forth, sniffing the grass and the air, pausing occasionally to prick their ears and listen intently, then padding away again, obviously on guard duty.
During the previous night, Chyna had used rage to overcome her terror before it had incapacitated her, but now she discovered that humiliation was even more effective at quelling fear. Having been unable to protect herself, having wound up in bondage—that was not the source of her humiliation; what mortified worse was her failure to fulfill her promise to the girl in the cellar.
I am your guardian. I’ll keep you safe.
She kept returning, in memory, to the upholstered vestibule and the view port on the inner door. The girl among the dolls had given no indication that she had heard the promise. But Chyna was sick with the certainty that she had raised false hopes, that the girl would feel betrayed and more abandoned than ever, and that she would withdraw even further into her private Elsewhere.