Sara’s Game (Book 1) – nook p. 100

“Sara wadded up the slip of paper and threw it at the cage wall, toward the tall man’s face.”

He ducked, slowly though, and it slid through the bars and hit his shoulder. She knew she was taunting him, torturing him, and it felt good. “There,” she said. “Eat that.”

He knelt down and picked it up. From behind the cage walls he looked as if he’d shrunken six inches in the last two days. And why shouldn’t he? He’d lost everything – freedom, hope, even, it seemed, the will to live. His long fingers stretched to pick up the crumpled wad of paper, on which he’d written, in his own blood apparently, PLEASE LET ME GO. When he passed it to her, silent, pleading with his eyes because his tongue couldn’t work any longer, because it was lying ten feet away in the dirt, flies already attracted to the rotting flesh, he hadn’t been able to meet her gaze. Her, the tormentor, the captor, the role-reverser.

Her, the one who’d taken him prisoner and thus begun her revenge just twenty-four hours earlier. Her, the one who’d been severely traumatized by this same man twenty years earlier. Her, who had spent years and years in the meantime plotting this revenge, this retribution, this justice that was so far from coming in the “injustice” system that was the courts. Justice? Ha! She’d seen what justice looked like when the judge did not believe a nineteen-year-old girl about the horrors this forty-one-year old had inflicted upon her. Injustice when they said that the statute of limitations had expired. Justice? To say that simply because it was way back in the past it didn’t matter, didn’t count, or still wasn’t impacting her daily life?

Sara had accepted his note, had read it, had crumpled it up and tossed it back in his face. He did pick it up, then, unfolded it, and turned it to show her. He held it upside down.

She laughed. “Damn,” she said, and reached in the bars to right the paper. “It goes this—

He grabbed her hand and yanked her towards the bars. Out of his mouth came a spew of blood, spraying her eyes and blinding her. The shock startled her, and before she could react he had his other hand too through the bars onto hers, and she was somehow now pinned against the wall of the cage with her arms trapped inside, held in a vise grip of his two stronger ones.

“Oh fuck,” she thought. “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck-“