LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

      Near Taos, New Mexico

      Halle didn’t think he knew—until he held out the test-kit wand and pointed firmly at the bucket in the corner that had been her only toilet for the past ten months.

      Ten months, as near as she could figure. It must be getting close to her nineteenth birthday, and she had no reason to think she wouldn’t still be here for her twentieth. She hadn’t kept track of the days until after the first week or so, when she’d realized he was going to keep her alive, at least for a while. She’d never expected that she might be rescued. There was no one to come and save her, no one even to notice she was gone. The first time she woke up and was almost unable to remember what day it was, she knew she was going to have to start marking time somehow. Now she kept track of the days in the dust way underneath the bed. He couldn’t wriggle under that far even if he wanted to, the fat fucking pig.

      It was a nice bed. The nicest thing in the tiny basement dungeon. But that was only because he was so often in it. She wasn’t supposed to sleep in it herself, though. She was only allowed into the bed to service him. Her bed was a dog bed. A circular one, with a single blanket, at the foot of the plush bed. In the other two corners were her bucket toilet and her shower: an ordinary cold water spigot set high in the wall, with a drain in the concrete floor underneath it.

      If she slept in the bed, he would know. He always knew. And he would punish her. He would snap her ankles and wrists into the shackles attached to the wall, and he would torture her for a little while. Hot wax. A lit cigarette. Whips and paddles and clothespins. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t a turn-on. It wasn’t about pleasure or surrender or any of that stuff people who consider themselves sexually adventurous fantasize about. It was horrible. It was a nightmare. It was a living hell. Pain wasn’t pleasure. Pain was just pain. And this guy wasn’t Christian Grey. He was a sick, perverted bastard who enjoyed hurting and humiliating women.

      And now she was pregnant. And he knew. Somehow he knew.

      “I—I don’t have to go, sir.” She always had to address him as “sir.” Or “master.”

      “Did I give you permission to speak?”

      She kept her eyes lowered, shook her head to answer and took the wand from him. Then she squatted over the disgusting bucket he only emptied when it suited him and peed on the wand, praying it would somehow lie to him. Keep her secret.

      He took it from her, and she stood submissively in front of him, head down, resisting the urge to hug her short satin bathrobe around her, because that would be considered insubordination. To cover herself in his presence was a huge offense. There was no sash to the robe. She wasn’t allowed to wear anything else unless he told her to, although there were clothes in a plastic bin under the bed. He bought them for her all the time and sometimes had her dress up in them. But mostly she lived in the short robe.

      After a minute he sighed heavily and shoved the wand under her downturned head so she could read the results for herself. She’d already known, but somehow seeing the plus sign made it worse. She couldn’t bear the thought of what he might do with a baby. What was she going to do?

      “Well, you’ve been a good girl,” he said. “You hear me? You’ve been a good girl. But I’m gonna have to let you go now.”

      She brought her head up fast, eyes widening, then quickly lowered it again.

      “Why don’t you pack your things while I make a phone call? Here.” He pulled a plastic trash bag from his pocket. He often had one on him. He liked to smother her until she passed out sometimes. After almost dying once or twice, she’d started faking it. But he wasn’t easy to fool. She had to wait until the black spots started popping into her eyes to make it convincing.

      “You... You’re letting me go?” she whispered, daring to meet his eyes again, briefly.

      He smiled and nodded, reaching out to stroke her coarse curls. “Yes. Now pack.”

      Her heart jumped in her chest, but she took the bag from him. She didn’t want anything he’d given her, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. It would offend him. He might change his mind. Oh, God, it was over. It was finally over.

      She knelt and pulled the plastic tub out from beneath the bed, scooped everything out of it in one big armful and then rose and dropped the clothes on the bed. Quickly, she opened the bag and began shoving the clothing into it, while he stood behind her with his cell phone. She could hear the tones when he tapped the keys, and then the ringing.

      She heard someone answer, and then a sound that made her heart clench tight as the cold steel of what she knew was a gun barrel pressed against the back of her head.

      “I’m gonna need another girl,” he said to the person on the phone.

      And that was the last thing she ever heard.

      Binghamton, New York

      “It’s time for you to face it, Stephanie. You’re never going to see again.”

      It had been two months since she’d heard those words from the dire-voiced doctor she imagined looked like an undertaker. And they were still replaying in her mind every time she let herself drift.

      Coaching sessions were one of those times.

      Stevie had once believed that there was always hope, unless you were talking to a corpse. Well, Dr. Langley had talked to her just as if he were talking to a corpse that day. No hope, he’d said. No way it can happen, he’d said. It was time to begin accepting that this was her new way of life, he’d said. And it was like the light in her heart just blinked out. No hope.

      Everything she’d ever believed about the world, about herself, about everything, blinked out with it. No hope. A dark curtain lowered itself across the stage of her life. She felt its weight as if she’d been standing right beneath it. It was heavy and cold and black, and she didn’t think she was going to be able to keep going.

      “There are a lot of blind people who live productive, fulfilling lives,” Dr. Undertaker had said. “It’s only one sense out of five. You have four more to fall back on.”

      “Look at Rachel de Luca,” her mother had added.

      “Fuck Rachel de Luca” had been her reply. It had shocked her to hear herself sound that dark. And it had shocked her mother, too.

      That had been two months ago, and now it was May and her days were still as dark as her nights. She spent her mornings in one-on-one therapy with her shrink and group therapy with a bunch of other disabled people. Paraplegics, vets missing limbs, that sort of thing. No other blind people, though. And in the afternoons she had lessons with her coach, Loren Markovich, a mid-forties pain-in-the-ass who was constantly quoting self-help authors to her. Rachel de Luca had been one of her suggestions. The self-help author who’d been blind for twenty-some-odd years. Stevie’s mom and her blindness coach had been shoving de Luca’s self-help audio books down her throat since the accident. And she’d listened to them, eagerly sucking up the notion that she could change her reality. She’d believed it. She’d been sure she could positive-think her way out of this endless night. It had worked for the author, after all.

      It made Stevie want

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