my tears ricochet

Chapter Seventy Four

"I'm asking you nicely. Are you going to cooperate or do I need to continue?" The Governor asked as he yanked up the fallen chair from the floor. "All this stops if you just tell me where your people are hiding."

"What people?" Ivy ground out, yanking against the hold Carlos had on her arm. A knife flashed as the man pulled it out from his still undone belt. It caught the flickering light from the bulb above, shadows jumping and skating across the walls. "It's just me."

His mouth twisted in an imitation of a smile but she caught the plastic shine to the movement, the teeth presented. All of it was a threat. The Governor had smiled the entire he had torn her into pieces. He had smiled when she cried and begged; he had grinned when Carlos held her arms straight back and forced her back to arch from the potion.

Ivy's pain was a punchline to a joke she was sewn into.

"We make examples out of liars here. This is your last chance to confess."

Her soul burned. Ivy's body hurt from the butchery but she bared her teeth back in a smile. "Go to hell."

Carlos squeezed her wrist so tight that the bones threatened to crack from the force of it. His tattoo of spiderwebs across his hands looked faded from age and sun but the lines ran neatly still; hands catching prey the same as any real spider. "Feral bitch. She's not giving much up. You sure she has anything of value?"

"Merle seems to believe that the boy might be a lead back to his brother. And I think she might be worth keeping around for a spell."

Ivy had tried fighting and it had won her nothing. The flickering light made the Governor's face look harsher, highlighting the dark blood crusting along his chin. "You're gonna die," she rasped out, weighed down by pain and darkness. "My dad is going to find you."

The Governor laughed like it was funny, like she was being funny. "I had a daughter, you know. But that was before. And you're here now. Nobody is going to find you."

The road had turned into a strange place and they were tucked underground, buried alive by metal and concrete. Daryl could track anything in the woods but he wouldn't have anything to start with, no way to unspool their passage.

If he was even looking for her.

"Your daddy give you that beating?" Carlos sneered as he forced her arm out and caught her fist before it made contact. "Just carve her. She's begging for it."

Ivy had begged. She had screamed and cried, fighting and pleading for it to stop.

And it simply hadn't.

The Governor trailed the blade across her wrist and she flinched. The metal was cold and it was going to hurt, whatever he was planning on doing. He traced it along kite string like veins and watched with vague delight at the fear it caused. "Must've hurt, those scars. How'd he do it?"

Any chance of escaping was burnt out. Ivy remembered the angry motion of her father lunging at her to keep her in place, one hand swinging the belt down. The scars were her entire childhood, the future she had grown into and fought for. Cigarette burns across her shoulders, constellations etched into skin, the line across her arm from hitting a doorframe wrong.

And Ivy was going to keep collecting scars. All the fragments of trauma; the memory of fear and pain preserved so she would carry with her forever.

Her mouth split open and she wasn't smiling anymore. "He wasn't... he wasn't a bitch about it," she snarled, fresh rage igniting within her soul, the last bit of fight rising up in her chest. "You're not getting anything from me."

Except for the pieces he had stolen already.

"Whore," Carlos bit out, disgusted.

But the Governor looked interested. For a moment the world was frozen, an ecosystem of dust and her blood, the papery wings of a dead butterfly in the corner. And then he started cutting.