A Ruthless Victim by Nadia Siddiqui (best novels to read for students .txt) 📗

hear him if he starts to scream? Will she hear her name if it’s called to her? Nathan doesn’t want to even venture a single guess as to what must have happened to the two of them down here. Alex is a twisted fuck, and even worse, that woman upstairs, Tabitha, is clearly in on it.

The shock of it is messing with his memory. For a handful of moments, Nathan’s vision is split between the vision that he can see with his own two eyes in the present, and a twisted montage of things that Lila has seen. She’s not a woman that Nathan knows, but for whatever reason in the course of this case, they are linked. He sees the flashes as if he’s her yet again.

Flashes of her being ripped from Emma’s arms as that bitch Tabitha plays with her daughter’s hair. Twisting it into neat braids despite the fact that they give them nothing more than a bucket of their own piss to wash with. Emma being dragged by her ankles kicking and screaming down the hallway toward the surgical suite and being strapped down onto the table. Her feet forced up into the obstetrical stirrups that Alex placed here on purpose with only the goal of keeping her legs strapped in place and splayed open in mind. Unable to move - unable to do anything but scream and cry for him to stop.

Images of her being thrown, still bloody, back into the room with her daughter and in the position to where she cannot cry any longer, where she cannot scream anymore because she doesn’t want to frighten Emma any more than she has already been frightened. Going over and over the same questions if she has been hurt, if the bad lady has touched her in a bad way. Asking if she’s okay. Singing to her whenever Emma’s tummy gets all grumbly. Attempting to make shadow puppets on the wall to keep her daughter entertained and playing silly sing song games like ‘This little piggy went to market’ and rocking her for hours to keep her asleep until she is allowed to put Emma on the stacked mattresses and curl into a ball around her while silent tears soothe her to sleep. She doesn’t know why this man took her; she doesn’t know him, and she has to assume that it’s random; that they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. She plays over the day that he kidnapped her and her daughter over and over again in her head, cursing herself for not fighting harder, telling herself over and over again that there must have been something that she could have done more. Some little detail that she cannot remember that would have changed the entire outcome, would have made it better for them somehow. Something, anything that she could have done.

Mostly she cries until she’s too dehydrated to cry any longer. She starts to count her ribs under her own skin as the healthy weight she normally carried melts away, but Emma needs to eat, and they never give them enough for both of them to eat enough. Emma is a growing little girl, and she’s always so hungry, so nearly everything goes to her, which makes her weaker, means that she can fight back even less. It makes it hurt more whenever he takes her. She can’t ignore the pain when the bruises come and they take longer to heal each and every time. The worst is when she’s too weak to scream, and he shoves her in the box. A small hole in the wall that she presumes used to be a walk in freezer where they placed all of the dead animals back when this was a hospital. He leaves her in there for days at a time until she scratches her nails bloody and breaks her toes kicking at that door until she’s allowed to have her daughter back in her arms. The hole takes the fight out of her, so even when she’s too hollow inside to scream...she screams anyway.

Somewhere along the line, she loses hope - and spends all of her days telling Emma every detail of every story and movie that she can remember. She tells Emma everything, despite the fact that she’s only speaking in bits and pieces, everything is going to be delayed from growing up here in such a small space. She doesn’t know what the man will end up doing with them. She never knows, and he doesn’t seem to want anything from them but pain. He seems to only exist to get off on pain. Such monsters never existed in her childhood. Things and people like this weren’t cautionary tales told to her at any point in her otherwise sheltered life, and now she’s having the worst sort of reality crash course. She knows that she should be stronger for Emma...but it’s so hard. It hurts so much when he cuts her; it hurts so much when he doesn’t. His appetites are deranged. Daily, she wishes nothing more than to be given sandpaper so that she can scrub her skin over and over again until she’s nothing but a raw, bloody mess. Perhaps then he wouldn’t want her anymore. She doesn’t want to die because she doesn’t know what he will do to Emma when she’s older. Every day is fear. Constant, unending fear.

Then the vision shifts to something more than the numb regular terror; there’s a new person. Suddenly, Nathan is Lila, staring at himself in a cell like her own, across from her. For a moment, they are one, and Nathan can’t sort out their vision into two again. He hasn’t even realized that she’s fully awake until he realizes that she can see herself through him as well. It is a connection unlike anything that he has ever felt before, one that he wishes he could hold onto, that she