Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) (13 page)

But she
was still a human, still a person with feelings and a family. And she would be
receiving torture for things I’d done. That just wasn’t fair.

It also
wasn’t fair that I was here. In this situation, in this moment, I had to choose
my life over hers. This wasn’t the time to be a hero and throw myself in front
of a speeding train to save her. I had to save myself. Not for me as much as
for my little Mason with his little brand new teeth and his wobbly newfound
walk.

So I said
nothing.

“That’s
what I thought,” Ron said.

In all the
years to come, assuming I survived, I would hear those words echo in my mind.
That’s what I thought.
But the words
weren’t going to be what would haunt me. What would haunt me would be the look
on Melinda’s face when she realized that I wasn’t going to trade places with
her. If a soul could shatter into a million little pieces, hers just had. And
if a heart could snap in half and drain the life juice out of a person, mine
just had. If I lived a thousand years, I’d never forget the look on her face or
the way I felt about myself in that moment. But even knowing all these things,
I still couldn’t bring myself to trade places with her.
Had I
not been a mother, maybe.
But I was. And I just couldn’t do it.

Ron laid
an old leather tool belt on the floor beside him. From it, he pulled a hammer
and a chisel. Still squatted, he moved toward her left hand.

“Nicole,
make sure you watch this. Melinda, this is going to hurt a bit, I’m afraid.”

Situating
himself so that I could see his every move, he put one foot on her forearm and
pressed down, paralyzing the muscles and tendons in her forearm and hand,
making it impossible for her to move her fingers. He put the chisel against her
skin and beat it one hard time with the hammer. That’s all it took to cut off
her finger.

As she
screamed and howled through a hoarse throat, Ron picked up the finger and
showed me. Her thin gold wedding band was still attached. He laid it on the
tool belt and returned the tools to their place.

“Tell
Nicole how much you enjoy taking her punishment,” he told Melinda.

In between
screams, she shouted, “I hate you, bitch!”

Through my
tears, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Go to
hell,” she screamed to me. To Ron, she begged, “Please stop.
Pleasepleaseplease
stop.”

Of course
he didn’t.

He pulled
a knife from the tool belt. I guessed the blade to be about eight inches long.
It was big. He put it to Melinda’s belly, and I could only watch as she began
to thrash around as much as possible while alternately begging him to stop and
screaming.

“Since
this is for Nicole, I thought we’d carve her name onto your flesh. What do you
think of that, Melinda?”

“No,” she
screamed. “Please no! Please!”

As Ron
began to carve into Melinda’s skin, making a large N as slowly as he could, I
began to beg him to stop. Melinda’s and my pleas mingled together.

“I guess
you should just be happy that her name isn’t Marguerite,” he joked as he
continued slicing her.

As the
blood spilled off her belly and slowly ran across the floor toward the drain, I
cried harder than I had since he’d brought me here. Her pain was because of me.
And if I’d been a stronger person, a better person, I would’ve switched places
with her. But I couldn’t. All I could do was watch and cry and beg him to stop.

“There,”
he said when he’d spelled out my name in big letters across her stretch marked
belly. “Now you can always remember this day, and your good friend Nicole.”

She
continued to scream, though her voice was going. It broke often, cutting out
completely at times.

Ron stood
with his tools and turned to walk away from her. But he quickly turned back and
stuck the cattle prod to one of the open cuts on her belly. She howled and
screamed through clenched teeth as her body spasmed, and then suddenly, there
was nothing else.

Afraid she
was
dead,
I focused on her face and chest. She was
still very much alive. But her voice was gone. She was still screaming her head
off, but no sound came from her.

Ron
chuckled and walked away. He returned everything to its place and walked over
to me.

“I’m going
upstairs. I’ll come retrieve you later. Enjoy your time with Melinda. Had her
voice not given out on her, I’m sure she would’ve had plenty to say to you.” He
smiled and walked up the stairs, leaving me in the basement, crying and laden
with guilt.

Chapter
20

I cried
nearly the entire time I was in the basement. I couldn’t help it. The guilt was
heavy, though I tried to tell myself that he was torturing her anyway, and he would’ve
surely done those things to her even without me as a reason. The only reason he
said it was my fault was to torture me too. He liked me enough to not want to
torture me physically, but not enough keep him from torturing me mentally,
emotionally, and psychologically. I knew this really wasn’t my fault, but I
still felt horrible.

Sometime
later, Ron returned. As he removed the cuff from my left wrist and helped me to
my feet, he asked, “Are you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” I
said, though the answer was both yes and no. I was glad to be leaving the
basement, but I was never glad to see him.

“Good. I
thought you might be.” He kissed my cheek softly and led me up the stairs. “I
made you some scrambled eggs and bacon and toast.”

Confused,
I asked, “It’s morning?”

“Of course.”

“You left
me down there all night?”

“Yes. It
doesn’t seem like it, does it? Time flies when you’re having fun.”

The son of
a bitch had left me down there all night. No wonder I was tired and my back was
stiff.

Even
though he sometimes slipped something into my food to knock me out so he could
take me to the basement, I was looking forward to eating a good breakfast. He’d
only done it a couple times so far, and only after I’d angered him. I was
starving and he was a good cook. As I’d done nothing wrong, I didn’t think he’d
drug me again so soon.

I sat in
the usual chair as he locked the cuff to the underside of the table. I yawned,
and immediately felt guilty about doing so. Melinda had gone through all that,
and I was yawning and upset because he’d left me in the basement all night. I
was selfish.

I was
wiping my swollen eyes with my hand when he brought my plate. He set it down in
front of me, went to the other side of the table, and took his seat.

With the
spoon in my hand, I scooped up a wad of scrambled eggs and put them in my
mouth. As always, they were delicious. I put another scoop in my mouth and
looked around at the other food on my plate. The bacon looked perfect. The
toast had the right amount of butter melted into it. But then I saw something
else, something that nearly made me vomit.

I stopped
chewing immediately and stared at it. Ron must’ve been watching me.

“I think
that’s appropriate, don’t you?”

I shook my
head, afraid that if I opened my mouth to speak, I’d puke.

“You don’t
have to eat it. It’s just a little reminder.”

Forcing
myself to swallow the mouthful of eggs, I said, “What’s it supposed to remind
me of, Ron? The kind of person you are?”

“No. It’s
to remind you to be a good girl.”

“How can I
eat with that on my plate?”

“It’s not
touching any food. It’s just there for you to see. You don’t have to touch it
or eat it. Just see it.”

“I don’t
know if I can eat with it there. It’s gross. Can’t you just put it on the table
or something? Does it have to be on my plate?”

“Yes,
Nicole. It does,” he said sharply. “How else will you learn?” He softened his
voice and said, “Think of it as Melinda giving you the finger.” He laughed.

I didn’t.

How the
hell was I supposed to eat with a severed finger on my plate, nestled between
the eggs and the bacon? How could I even have an appetite when she’d lost that
finger because of me? I hated him and I hated myself.

I dropped
the spoon. It fell to the plate, clanking against the wedding band on the
finger.

“You’re
not finished, are you? You’ve hardly eaten anything?”

“I’m not
very hungry.”

“You were
until you saw the reminder. Is that what’s wrong?”

“Yeah.
It’s
disgusting. I can’t eat with that there, especially knowing it’s my fault.”

He smiled
and nodded. “Then it’s working perfectly. I want you to eat, don’t get me
wrong. But I want you to learn. Yes, this lesson has already taught you so much
more than just being left on an old mattress did. I don’t see that we’ll have
any more problems, do you?”

I shook my
head.

I didn’t
eat anymore at breakfast. I just couldn’t. But at lunch, it was on the plate.
At supper, it was on the plate. The next morning, there it was, sitting beside
my waffles. At lunch, it was lying beside my sandwich. At dinner, it was beside
the pot roast on my plate. Every meal for the next few days was garnished with
Melinda’s severed finger. It was starting to smell. Even over the
mouth-watering aromas of the food, I could detect the stench of decay rising
from the plate. Just as my stomach growled from the anticipation of the food,
it flip-flopped at the smell and sight of the finger.

This went
on for days. Ron brought me a hearty plate of food containing a rotting finger,
and each time, he took it away untouched. By the seventh day, I was absolutely
starving. I had to eat something. As Ron sat across from me eating as if
nothing was wrong, I managed to talk myself into eating without looking at the
finger or eating anything on the same side of the plate as the finger. If I
only ate the food on the opposite side of the plate, that would be okay. Well,
not okay, but better than eating the food near the rotting digit, and certainly
better than starving.

That method
worked for a couple of days, but Ron soon caught on to what I was doing. Then,
he started serving my plates to me with the finger in the middle of the food. For
a few days, I didn’t eat. But when the hunger pains returned, I started eating the
food from the edges of the plate. Anything that wasn’t close to the finger, I
ate.

Finally,
sometime after my next menstrual cycle, Ron quit putting the finger on my plate
altogether. When I first didn’t see the appendage among my food, I worried that
he’d cooked it and was serving it to me. I hesitated at dinner the first night
without it, afraid to eat the food. I couldn’t shake the thought that chopped
up inside the meat loaf was what was left of the flesh from the finger.

Ron saw my
hesitation and explained himself. “The skin was rotting off the bone, and I
don’t want you to accidentally eat any of it and get sick. When the skin is
completely rotted away, I may return the bones to your plate, but I don’t think
that’ll be necessary. I truly believe you’ve learned your lesson. Am I wrong,
Nicole?”

I shook my
head, disgusted that he still had the finger. I briefly wondered where he was
keeping it. Up until now, he’d kept it in a bag in the freezer, taking it out
for each meal, returning it when the meal was done. I had no doubt that it was
there now, as he spoke, and I wondered how long he would leave it in there.

It wasn’t
long after he stopped putting her finger on my plate that Melinda died.

Ron had
came to my room that night and asked me if I was ready to have him. I told him
I still wasn’t ready, which of course made him angry. I heard him storm down
the steps to the basement, and I didn’t hear him return until the sun shone
through the windows the next morning. He dragged himself into my room to tell
me that she’d died. Judging by the way he looked that morning as he stood
beside the bed, hair disheveled, eyes wild, clothes filthy and bloody, I had no
doubt that he’d raped her and killed her, just as he had Stephanie. And just as
with Stephanie, it was all because I wouldn’t have sex with him.

The guilt
was heavier after that. It was my fault. Everything that had happened to her
was my fault. It was even my fault that she was here. Had I not made him angry,
he might not have killed Stephanie. Then, he wouldn’t have been at the bar the
night he ran into Melinda. He wouldn’t have brought her home with him, and she
wouldn’t have been here to endure the torture that he inflicted upon her in my
name.
All.
My.
Fault.

As I
watched him bring Melinda out of the basement one bag at a time, I knew what I
had to do.

I spent a
few days trying to talk myself into letting him have me in the way that he
wanted, hoping that maybe he wouldn’t bring another girl to this house and
torture her the way he had the others. But it was too late. By the time I
worked up the nerve to tell him that he could have me in that way, he had
already brought another girl to the house.