The Price You Pay

The Price You Pay: Chapter 01

RIDDHIMA'S POV

"Riddhima? Riddhima, wake up. Riddhima? Can you hear me?"

A soft woman's voice breaks through my sleeping daze and I force myself to open my eyes. I have to blink a few times to clear my vision.

A ceiling, too close above me. The space I am in is altogether too small. I panic and get up, only to find I am constrained. I can't move my hips.

Panic levels rising, I gasp in a breath that is almost too large for my lungs. My body doesn't give me time to breathe out as I gasp for air again. My hands fly to my neck, my eyes are widening.

Where the hell am I? Why can't I move?

"Riddhima? Look at me. Look at me, Riddhima," the woman's voice beside me keeps pleading. I realize she's been speaking to me ever since I woke up and started panicking.

I'm hyperventilating just a tad too much to be really able to listen to her, though.

She doesn't give up. Renee never gives up on me. She sits beside me, her big brown eyes full of trust and reassurance, I see when I finally meet her gaze.

"Count with me," Renee says softly. "Here we go. One: you're okay. Two: you're on a plane. You're buckled in, that's why you can't move. Three: You are on your way to Washington. Four: Your feet are firmly on the ground. Five: you are breathing regularly. Six: your heart rate is slowing down. Seven:..."

As I look unblinking at Renee and silently count with her, my eyes fill up with tears. I'll miss her. I'll miss her so much. The counting method was her idea to help me ground when I'm upset. Start with knowing where you are, then counting your way up to breathing normally and being able to face the world again. And it works, right now it works again. My breathing slows, I get myself in check once more.

She is the only therapist that ever got through to me. And now she is leaving me, too.

Things have gone so fast. After being saved from Stefan at the age of fourteen, I finally got to settle with a family in Phoenix. My foster parents, Rajeev and Sonia, had been so nice at first. There had been hopes of adoption.

They had two other foster kids, Shanaya and Peter. I didn't really like them and we left each other alone, mostly. They came from broken homes, too. Shanaya took the art of being a bitch to a whole new level. I learned to stay out of her way when I found my books burnt in the fireplace. It wasn't like we could talk with each other about it, or something.

But then Sonia miscarried again and she just collapsed or something. It was like her light went out. She got real nasty with us. She made it damn sure that I knew I was worth nothing. She got so depressed eventually that she had to be committed to a mental hospital. Shanaya and Peter were replaced swiftly, but they couldn't find a suitable home for me quickly enough.

It took seven months. Glitch in the matrix, file went lost, computer crashed, and I just had to wait. I didn't tell Renee what was going on. I couldn't. From the second week after Sonia was hospitalized Rajeev got lonely and drunk and all hell broke loose and history repeated itself on me. I thought it was just my deal in this life, so at first I wasn't even that alarmed by it. The beatings were just physical pain. But then when he started to come to my bed at night, it was harder to ignore. It was like it had been before, with Stefan, but somehow worse. One night, I snapped.

Although I couldn't tell her what happened, Renee had understood immediately when I showed up at her house at 2 am on a Saturday night. She brought me to the hospital and I could stay with her for the couple of weeks it took her to find me a new home.