Rage and Ruin | 2

4 | 2

G I G I

      It was so dark. So dark.

      Wherever they'd pulled over my head blocked out any light in the room. For the millionth time, I yanked at the chains restraining my arms and legs. I'd done everything I could to try to break free but to no avail. My throat was raked dry from screaming. I wondered who'd heard me. If anyone had.

I'd been given food and water three times. Someone had been forced to shovel the food into my mouth because I was so confined by the chains. At first, I'd screamed and fought. However, once I realized that I needed to sustain myself to live through this experience and that that was more important than my pride, I'd become compliant.

I had no idea how long I'd been down here. At least two or three days. It felt longer than that. There seemed to be no end to this prison sentence.

The longer I was in the darkness like this, the more I felt my mind beginning to go to places I wished it wouldn't. Sometimes, my thoughts didn't even make sense. They got dangerously close to the line I'd drawn around them, threatening to go even darker.

I wasn't crazy. I wasn't crazy. I wasn't crazy.

My heart pounded in my ears. I felt it all around my body. As I was struggling to calm my breathing, my nails dug into the palms of my hands, threatening to break the skin.

No, no, no.

Blank walls. A padded room. The heavy door that hardly ever opened. Food on a platter sliding through a slit in the wall. Listening to myself breathing at night to fall asleep.

Doctors taking blood samples. My stiff bed. Chains around my wrists. A formless hospital gown on my body. Staring for hours at the white walls.

Alone, so devastatingly alone.

I closed my eyes. This was the ONNT headquarters. I was in a cell somewhere underground. I was not there.

The asylum.

The very name made me forget the rage burning in my veins and replaced it with emptiness so deep I wondered if I'd ever feel anything again. The same emptiness I had felt for six years since they'd wrongfully put me there.

My mother. She would have comforted me now. I knew she wished she could have been with me in those cold, blank years.

But she was dead, I remembered, in a quick flash of pain. Dead, dead, dead.

That hollow feeling in my chest was back. Like a hole had been made in my heart. Like someone had ripped out a part of me that I couldn't get back.

Suddenly overwhelmed with feeling, I screamed so loudly I thought my lungs might tear. My hands shook against the chains binding me, looking for any way of escape. I felt it all. I couldn't see anything. The darkness was everywhere. I was blind, so blind...

Julia.

I instantly stilled. I knew that voice better than my own.

Julia.

A rogue tear slid down my face under the sack they'd thrown over my head. It was my mother. I thought I'd never hear her again.

"Yes?" How was she here? I'd been to her funeral.

Pull yourself together, girl. Look at you.

I sniffled. "I know, I'm sorry. I just—that place, it's so much like this cell."