Page 49 of Drowning in the Deep
“Am I dreaming?” I muttered under my breath, hoping he didn’t say that I was.
“No, you’re not dreaming, but we need to get you out of here,” he said. “Do you happen to know where the key is?”
“Wh-what?” I stammered, wishing I could see him, but it was still dark, even with a thin splash of light that spilled through the open door, and my eyes were not cooperating. When I stood perfectly still and focused, I could see his face.
It was him. Daemon had come for me—finally. All of these hours I had been down here, probably days, I’d been begging the universe to let him come, and now he was here.
And he was asking me where the fucking key was?
“No, I don’t know where it’s at,” I told him. “My father didn’t say, ‘Hey, in case someone comes to rescue you, the key is on top of the doorjamb.’” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice, even though I really was exceedingly happy that he was there. I knew he’d find a way to get me out of there, one way or another.
“The doorjamb,” Daemon repeated as he stepped away from me. As much as it hurt to have his hands on me, it somehow hurt more for him to release me. I wanted to know that he was still there, to feel him since I couldn’t see him, though I could hear him outside of the closet door. “Fuck,” he mumbled. “Not there.”
My father could often be stupid, but he wasn’t usually that dumb. Of course, it wasn’t there. “He said he went to a wedding. I have no idea when he’ll be back.”
Something about that statement made Daemon chuckle under his breath. “I hope he likes bloody vomit,” he said.
“What’s that?” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could hear him rummaging around on a shelf near the door. “There have to be guards upstairs. Can you be a little quieter?”
“Your hearing is amplified because you can’t fucking see,” he told me. That made sense, but I still thought he was being unbelievably loud. “Besides, the maid said she was the only one home.”
“And you believed her?” I asked as he knocked a bunch of shit on the floor.
“No, not really, but I’m not too worried about it. I’ll get you out of here alive,” he promised me.
I believed him. This whole time, I’d been standing here waiting for the Angel of Death to come and claim my soul, and instead, I’d gotten my dark angel. I knew he wouldn’t let me down. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt completely hopeless and he’d shown up to get me out of a sticky situation.
“All right,” I finally heard him say as he came back over. “Let’s try this.” I didn’t like the sound of his tone, but when I heard the sound of metal grinding on metal, I liked it even less. I couldn’t see what he was doing, and I didn’t dare to look up to see if I could make it out, but I had a feeling he was sawing through the chains of the handcuff with some sort of a metal saw.
Sparks flew, landing in my hair. It stung a little, but there really wasn’t a square inch of my body that didn’t hurt, so I ignored it. When he got through the first chain and my arm came free, the numbness turned to instant pain. I squealed slightly, used to keeping my discomfort inside but also feeling a lot freer to let Daemon know I was in pain than I ever would my father.
It took him a bit longer to get my other arm free. When he did, Daemon didn’t let it fall like the other had. Instead, he slowly lowered it, his fingers lightly grazing my skin as he worked to get the blood back into all of the right places.
I heard him exhale softly as he took my other arm between his hands and rubbed it, too. I slumped against him, enjoying the tenderness of his fingers on my screaming limbs. With the blood flow came some sharp aches and radiating pain, but I knew it was necessary if I was ever going to have full use of my hands again. The cuffs themselves hung around my wrists. Daemon slid them out of the way and rubbed the raw skin beneath them.
“Looks like you’ve been through a lot,” he whispered.
“Yeah, I have,” I told him, resting my head on his shoulder. Though I was cognizant of the fact that I looked like hell, I didn’t care. I breathed him in, my swollen nostrils seeming to regain their ability to function with his scent within them. The longer I stood there with him, the more my body seemed to heal. It was a stupid, ridiculous notion. I was obviously in need of a doctor, but being with Daemon made me feel stronger, like I could find a way to take on my father all over again.
“Who did this to you?” he asked. “Was it your father or his goons?”
A small chuckle escaped my lips. “Oh, he did it himself. There’s no way in hell he’d allow someone else to beat the shit out of me when he’s fully capable of doing so himself.”
“Why?” Daemon’s question sounded almost rhetorical, as if he were trying to guess how a father could torture his own daughter, but then I realized he wanted to know what my father was digging for.
“He found out I told you about the properties somehow,” I told him. My mind wasn’t working clearly. I remembered making mental notes of information I wanted to tell Daemon if I ever saw him again, but everything was getting jumbled up. “He was punishing me for taking your side, for choosing you, and he wanted me to tell him all of your secrets. I tried to tell him I didn’t know anything, which is essentially true, but he didn’t believe me. He did his best to break me, but I think you’d be proud of me, Daemon. I didn’t tell him anything. No matter what he did to me.”
“I am proud of you, baby,” he said, brushing his lips against my hairline in one of the only places where it didn’t hurt. “I’m very proud of you. It looks like you endured a whole lot of hell.”
“I did. He showed up at my apartment with some of his thugs and wrapped me in a nasty carpet,” I told him. All of those memories from the beginning of my torture were much clearer to me than what happened later. “Then, he threw me in here with a fucking rat. A real one. A big fat fucker. So I killed it,” I explained to him, wondering if the carcass was still in here. I couldn’t smell it, but then, all I could smell was Tabasco sauce and blood. “Then, he beat the shit out of me a few times, and when I still wouldn’t talk, he waterboarded me with seltzer water and hot sauce a few times. I thought I was going to die.” I managed to look into his dark eyes, though it was hard to see anything.
“Fuck,” was all Daemon could say. I knew he was shocked. “You managed to survive all of that?”
I nodded and then thought better of it as the world continued to tilt after I stopped moving my head. “Yeah. I didn’t have any choice. If you don’t believe me now when I say I’m loyal to you and not the La Rosas, well, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
In response, Daemon leaned down and pressed his mouth against my broken, chapped lips. It was a soft, quick kiss, but I felt the meaning behind it. “I believe you now, baby. I should’ve never doubted you. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, but you weren’t answering, and I’ve been kind of busy.”
“Ruling the world?” I asked with a sarcastic chuckle.
