Psychopathy

Chapter 3- Living Nightmare

Isabel took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down. She couldn't breathe too fast, or she'd use up all the oxygen in her little space. There were a few spots for air, but the holes were barely the size of her pinky, so she wasn't getting much out of them. She'd just have to make do until she was let out. She looked up, seeing nothing in the darkness. She reached up, and ran her hands along the metal lid of her box, pushing up on it. It rattled slightly, but otherwise, it didn't budge. She pushed it harder, but it still didn't open. She felt her heart start to speed up, but she forced herself to keep her breathing steady.

She had to stay calm. If she didn't, she just might die before she even had a chance to defend herself.

*********************

Ciara strained against the ropes binding her wrists together, trying to loosen them up. She had been working on them for the past forty-five minutes, but she wasn't about to give up just yet. Her feet weren't bound, but that didn't really matter. She was sitting on the floor of a van, and if she even tried to stand up, the driver would either speed up or slow down suddenly, the change in momentum sending her right back to the floor. She tried to pull her wrists apart again, but she was just met with stinging pain, telling her that her wrists had finally been rubbed raw.

If she could only see the damn knot, that'd be one thing.

But she couldn't, because her captor had yet to remove the blindfold from her eyes. It had been a long drive from D.C. to wherever he was taking her, and she had spent most of it in a box under a false floor in the van. While she was in the box, she hadn't been blindfolded, but that didn't really matter. She couldn't see a damn thing anyway. Instead, he had chosen to gag her, so if something happened and he had been pulled over for whatever reason, she wouldn't be able to scream loud enough to make her presence known. Well, at least the quiet and the dark had helped ease the headache she had woken up with.

Forty-five minutes before, though, her captor finally released her from the box and had set her on the floor of the van. That was when he removed the gag and made it into a blindfold, before tightly tying her wrists. At first, she had been confused about the purpose of depriving her of her sight. She knew his face and she knew his name. If he was trying to keep his identity a secret, then he had already failed. It was then, though, that she realized. She knew who had her. But she didn't know where he was taking her- and that was what he was trying to hide.

After another pull was met with pain, Ciara sighed, giving up on the venture. She wasn't about to undo the knot this way. She should focus her energy on figuring out a different way to escape. Without her sight, her brain was focusing more on her other senses, and she mentally asked them what they were perceiving. She wasn't getting anything from taste or smell and little from touch- all she could feel was the floor of the van, the rope around her wrists, the small bandage on her forehead, and the motion of the van on the highway. But it was hearing where she finally got something.

"How close are we?" a voice asked, and Ciara tensed. She knew her captor's voice, but it didn't make hearing it any easier on her. After all, it was a voice that had haunted her in her dreams and sometimes even tortured her while she was still awake. It was a voice that she could never, ever forget. And now she was doing the one thing she had hoped, more than anything else, she'd never do again- she was hearing it in real life and not just in her head.

She, of course, had known he was coming. She'd known for years that this was going to happen eventually- but that didn't mean she hadn't still hoped it wouldn't. Perhaps part of her knew better than to hope- but that hope had been what had kept her going for all those years. If she couldn't hope that she'd escape this fate, then she would have done herself in a long time ago. So instead she clung to that hope and let it drown out the rational side of her that said she shouldn't.