Truth of Dark Pasts by Serena Wood (win 10 ebook reader TXT) 📕

By the time I get to the top of the stairs, the high of whatever it is she gave me fully sinks in. I’m no longer worried about what was in the basement.

☀Ellie☀

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As soon as Chloe had uttered the low warning, a shiver of panic slides down my spine. She stands up and walks away from me, into the darker areas of the basement. She moves around, whatever she’s getting makes a small metallic sound that echoes through the silent basement.

She comes back to me with a knife in hand and the second I see the metal tip of the blade, I scoot away from her fearfully. She grabs onto my arm and yanks me to my feet before I can get away. She throws me roughly into some rusted lawn chair and it knocks the air out of my lungs. Being more distracted on trying to breathe, I don’t really pay attention as she pulls up another lawn chair and sits beside me, grabbing for my arm as soon as she’s seated. She starts cutting at my ropes and for some stupid reason I start to think maybe, just maybe, this is all some cruel joke and now she’s letting me go. But it’s only false hope.

When my arms are cut free, she sets the blade down beside her chair and moves this slab of wood between us. I don’t know what it’s used for, it’s just this piece of wood, nailed to a flatter wooden base. I can tell she made it herself but what she plans on using it for, I don’t know.

But it only takes a total of five seconds to find out. She takes my right arm and quickly slams it down over the wooden slab so fast that I don’t have time to process what she’s doing. My arm bends backwards over the wood and already I can feel every part of my arm straining to stay together. But she doesn’t give it the time to recover, as fast as she slams down my arm, she stands up abruptly and pushes her weight onto my wrist. It only takes seconds for the whole thing to happen, I don’t even get the chance to voice the pain until after I feel the bones snap.

For a few seconds I can’t seem to take in anything but the pain, but eventually I start to hear the banging. Chloe is already at the door, talking to whoever it is on the other side. I can’t seem to manage anything other than to gingerly hold my arm. I try to get out of the chair but I find my head is still too fuzzy because of the head injury she gave me that somehow got me here; I couldn’t stand if my life depended on it. I decide it’s probably best not to try anything, in fear she’ll make any pain she inflicts on me worse. So I sit here, hopelessly waiting for the torture that I know will come.

She walks back up to me after a minute and decides to ignore whoever is outside. They go silent for a bit and my attention is quickly pulled away from the locked door when she pulls me to my feet again. She grabs her knife before dragging me over to a table in the corner of the room. The person on the other side of that dreaded door comes back as she takes my right arm and puts it on the table. I try to pull my arm away, dreading another broken arm. But it backfires and she reacts by slamming my head onto the table. “Don’t move.” She pushes all of her body weight against me, pinning me to the table; she brings the knife up to my neck and makes a small cut on my collarbone just so she’s certain I’m not moving.

I let out a few panicked groans of pain until finally she sets the knife down on the table, right in front of my face. She keeps herself pressed against me so I couldn’t move, if I were still stupid enough to try again to escape. She puts my arm on the table again, keeping her other hand on my head so that I can’t even turn to see what it is she’ll do. She picks up something from the built in shelf below the table’s top and I wait on edge for the pain to start rushing though my arm like fire.

For a few seconds, it doesn’t happen and I know she’s just prolonging it to make me suffer that much more. Suddenly something heavy smashes down on my hand; crushing my bones between it and the table.

Another scream of pain leaves me as she lifts the heavy object away from my hand. “I bet that’s going to make it hard for you to get free, hmm?” she snickers in my ear before moving away from me and setting down a 25 pound weight on the table by the hunting knife.

The metallic banging on the door turns into nothing more than someone’s hand slamming against it. They start yelling again and vaguely I recognize the voice but it gets quieter before I can realize who it is.

Chloe steps away from me again and moves back to the door, this time opening it. I sink down to the floor as she passes through it, trying to caress the newly injured wound; but I find it near impossible with my broken arm. I can’t even try to stupidly comfort myself like a child without one of the wounds shooting fire through my body.

The person on the other side tries to get inside but Chloe manages to hold them back and the door slams shut, leaving me alone in this dark, damp room. Not knowing what to do, I try to crawl and inch my way to the nearest corner and slump against the wall. It feels like I’ve given up all hope, perhaps a little too easily. Regardless I just sit here and wait for my tormenter to return.

☯River☯

For a few minutes I think I fall asleep and I open my eyes to find the world blurred, bright, and colorful. I look around, realizing I’m on that bed again, in the same strange room I woke up in before.

“River?” the person beside me nudges my shoulder gently and I turn to look at them with this odd smile lazily stretched across my lips. Chloe’s blue eyes greet mine and she smiles back at me, “I’m sorry about earlier, okay?”

“Okay.” I mumble, trying to remember what it is she’s apologizing for. “I’m glad you’re not mad, I hate it when we fight.” She rubs my arm and something feels slightly off when she does it. “Me too.” I reply absentmindedly, trying to figure out why I feel so out of place. I’m high on something, that’s for sure. Did she talk me into smoking weed? I swear when I sober up, I’m going to have a serious talk with her about what she thinks is cool to do on the weekend.

I’ve never been into getting high and the sluggish effect it has on my body seems to be one clue as to why. I hate how weak I feel right now. I honestly don’t remember the last time I got high, if I ever really tried it fully. But still I can tell this isn’t weed that’s making me feel like this. Something isn’t piecing together.

I look around the room, my mind wandering absently. Chloe puts a hand on my cheek and pulls my attention back to her.

“I’m really happy you decided to try to fix things with me. We’re gonna get past this.” she kisses me lightly and my mind tries to piece together all of her actions in a frazzled, utterly stoned state.

Were we fighting about something? Why did she kiss me? Do we normally do that? the kiss didn’t feel unnatural, but yet it didn’t feel completely natural either. In the back of my mind I know that I’m use to kissing a girl, but is she the girl I’m use to kissing?

I try to kiss back in an effort to figure out the answer to that last thought. From what I can tell through my high, the kiss is okay. At least she’s not a terrible kisser. But still it doesn’t quite feel right, something is still out of place.

“Something’s not right.” I mutter, looking around the room again. I sit up to lean against the headboard, trying to get my mind to clear. She sits up too and within seconds she’s moving to sit in my lap. “You’re just high, relax baby. Just enjoy it.” she moves to kiss me again, more forcefully than the first time. I can’t really manage to react fast enough to kiss back, her movements are so much more fluid than mine and I start to wonder if she’s more sober than me. Or if she’s even high at all.

When the kiss breaks she moves to kiss my neck and not sure how to react, I settle back into the headboard. Whatever I’m on seems to intensify everything I feel and even though I’ll react to it at a slower pace, it still feels nice. She nibbles on my neck slightly and to me it feels like a gentle bite. I let out a small squeak, weather it's of pain or pleasure I can’t tell.

But it instantly reminds me of someone else. Ellie would make noises like that when I bit her. “Hey, wait… You’re not Ellie, you can’t do that.” I push her back slightly, my arms feeling too weak to even push her back more than a few inches.

“I know I’m not Ellie, but I’m the one you’re supposed to be with. Not her.” with that low growling tone in her voice, everything floods back to me. “You… you drugged me. I remember what you did. Get off of me, I need to see her.” again I try to push on her shoulders but she only pushes against me, her resistance making me lose what little strength I had.

She shifts her position slightly, moving her legs between mine as she pulls me back into the surface of the mattress. “I can’t, River. I’ve been waiting for this for too long. Please don’t resist, it’ll be more enjoyable for the both of us if you just forget about her and focus on us.”

My old fears resurface when she starts to talk like that, she’s talking just like my uncle and his friends did when they… “No, don’t. I can’t go through that again. Please, get off me.”

“I know what happened when you were little, your father told me. But I’m not like them, I swear. They had evil intentions, I only want to make you see how much love we have for each other.”