Shame Of Maastricht by Marie N. Hallen (any book recommendations TXT) 📕

and Lotte who were petrified in horror as they saw her mouth and bloodied face. The room was still poorly illuminated yet she could see their eyes and this time they expressed deep sorrow and compassion, or maybe there was something else in their facial expression but she wasn’t good enough at reading emotions. In fact she was afraid of finding out what they were thinking of her. She heard a very familiar sound she used to hear at the workshop where her grandfather worked as a carpenter until the day he died. Then she saw Bas holding a circ saw and blacked out as he pressed it to her left arm. Her blood splattered around.

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Don’t Say A Word

Felix approached Lotte and Luuk and unsealed their mouths once again. He also loosened Lotte’s chain by making it longer so that she could reach certain places in the room she couldn’t reach before. Unable to walk around, Lotte stopped and looked at Luuk hopelessly. She was almost paralyzed and couldn’t even scream although she had all the opportunities now with her mouth free. Luuk was breathing heavily. He turned around, fell on his knees and threw up after looking at Sven who was holding Kate’s severed arm, all covered in blood. Lotte grabbed a rag and threw it to Luuk. Then she closed her face with her hands, crying as loud as she could.

“I’m gonna kill you with my bare hands, once I get a chance! You’re dead!” he said hoarsely, gasping for air and trying to manage the dreadful nausea caused by the appalling view. “I wish we could fight head-to-head.”

“You’re a fucking coward!” Lotte joined him once she reacquired her voice, now trembling and breathing with fury, “I hope you will burn in hell for what you did, you all! You are human trash, barbarians, worse than pigs!”

There was blood on the walls, on the floor, on the chair where Kate was tortured, on Bas’s clothes and hands and everything he touched. Bas put away the saw and picked up all the instruments. He put them back into the toolbox and looked at the prisoners.

“I won’t repeat twice, my friends. To be honest I have already forgotten your names but this show is just a reminder about what happens to everyone who tries to make sounds louder than my voice now and who tries to argue and talk nonsense. By nonsense I mean everything you say as your words don’t mean everything to us unless you reply to our questions, for example, where your parents are. If you wish to go to the bathroom, you can bang on the door and we will show you the way.”

“She killed Anne, remember this,” Felix said bluntly and took a bottle of water from his bag. Sven grabbed the bottle, opened it and sprayed water into Kate’s face and on her bleeding wound.

Luuk and Lotte didn’t say a word. The realized it would be useless to throw curses at these inhuman beings blaming them for their deeds, unless they want to experience more ruthless aggression. Lotte, weeping and shaking, rushed to Kate who was lying unconscious. Luuk couldn’t make a single step ahead as he was too far and the chain wasn’t long enough. She checked on Kate’s pulse and pulled out the jacket to wrap it around the stump of her arm severed below the elbow. Lotte didn’t lose her doctor skills and managed to wrap the cloth properly as well as stop the blood promptly. To do so she had to tear one of the rags into stripes. In a few moments everything was finished. Kate’s face was pale and she didn’t move, but her pulse was still going on. Lotte covered her with the blanket and put the bag under her head.

“You shouldn’t close your eyes! Don’t close your eyes! You need to stay conscious, this is very important!” she tried to bring Kate back to consciousness by all possible means. “Luuk, she is hardly breathing!”

“She needs rest, Lotte, she needs to save her powers. I can’t reach any of you, but you have to disinfect the wound first!”

“Bas! She needs to go to the hospital! She will bleed to death! We need a doctor immediately!” Lotte screamed and fell on her knees before Bas.

“Doctor? It's out of the question. You are your own doctor.”

“She needs to be rushed to hospital immediately! In this very moment! Someone call a doctor, please! I promise we won’t tell anyone anything!” Lotte kep pleading although in vain. Bas wasn’t that type of person who would agree or show mercy. She refused to believe.

“What have we done? What have we done to you?” Luuk intruded, “We have a dying person here! This is getting serious, please, let her go or call a doctor, we don’t even have anything to take care of her!”

“Well, if she dies, you will have to share the territory with a corpse. And she will be left to rot here. I don’t cure my victims. Because no one will cure my parents.”

Bas pushed the blooded chair in the corner and took his leather case. He put the straw in the cup with water and left it on the table along with Sven’s bottle. No one noticed what happened to Kate’s severed hand.

“I’m gonna leave this here in case if your friend wants to drink,” he said and left the room.

“Do you think she will die, Luuk? I did everything possible!”

“She won’t die if you manage to disinfect the wound. But you are the only doctor here. This was really stupid. Please be careful, Lotte.”

“Where is her hand?”

“Does it matter now? He’s not calling a doctor. When I think of it, it makes me sick,” Luuk replied. His face looked more pale than ever and this was noticeable even in this dark room. “You can’t reattach it. It would be only possible within the four hours since they cut it off, but we don’t have a single chance. He has to be prosecuted. No, Lotte, I won’t pay him a cent.”

Lotte didn’t reply, she went to her place and remained there until the morning, leaving Kate to recover.

Kate found herself on the floor in the corner. The pain in the hand was unbearable, which outshone the pain in the sutures and the rest of her bruised face. It was stupid to react like that and maybe they wouldn’t lose much if she didn’t kill Anne as killing her didn’t bring anything but an inhuman punishment. It was a bizarre coincidence that all three were locked in the same room, in the same situation, with the same purpose. But how could Bas come across her and where did he see her for the first time? Was she careless somewhere? Kate hadn’t contacted anyone for the last two weeks neither in real life, nor online. She did support communication with her colleagues and could be seen at the supermarket in her neighbourhood. Her only friend Lazara Valdivia went to Cape Verde with her family last week. The car… They were following the taxi on her way to Maastricht. At what point did she notice them? They were getting closer to Maastricht when the car showed up behind. Probably the taxi driver was in contact with the crew or was one of them, working separately and choosing victims, helping to approach them or track them down. “They probably thought that if I could afford taxi, I would also be able to become a decent source of income for them. So simple,” Kate thought. She tried to recall the name of the taxi driver who picked her up but it disappeared from her mind as well as his appearance and voice. If she decided to describe him, she wouldn't be able to as the only fact that left an imprint in her mind was that the driver was male and middle-aged.

She also suspected there could be more reasons for abduction apart from the money aspect. Some people just don’t need a reason and their behavior cannot be explained. There will be no rational explanation. Every time Luuk and Lotte called the “guards” to go to the bathroom, they were trying to negotiate and begged for freedom, started threatening and showed aggression. Kate realized this was absolutely useless at least because no one showed the will and readiness to pay. They discussed many options for except and none of them seemed to be realistic. Luke spent hours and days trying to explore the room within his reach, he examined every wall, every corner, every spot and there was nothing he could break, destroy or move as Bas left them no chance. There was not a single hole in the walls, the metal pipes also couldn’t be moved. Lotte was trying to use her earring to unlock the chain on her leg but this didn’t work out. The atmosphere was becoming more gloomy and almost punishing.

Kate spent most of her time laying in the corner with her face against the wall. She behaved as as quiet as she could and was happy that she wouldn't have to answer stupid questions of those who ruined her life and tortured her. Not only Bas and his accomplices who chose her as their primary target but also this happy couple which just happened to end up imprisoned in the same room. She also tried not to listen to what Luuk and Lotte were talking about. Sometimes Whenever Lotte approached her to give her water through the straw, she tried to look away and hide her eyes so that no one could read her emotions or start the conversation she was afraid of. Good thing that the perpetrators deprived them all of the opportunity to talk most of the time.

“Why am I so weak?” she was thinking while falling asleep. “Why couldn’t I just unfriend him on all social media or even block? That’s what they usually do to you when you end up overboard. So why can’t I? Because. Because I just can’t.”

Finally her mind fell into the black abyss of sleep and she even saw a dream which was the first dream in the last year. She found herself in the place where she used to live as a child when she was only three. She remembered her childhood very well, perhaps since the age of two. But this period of her life was the most idyllic and dreamlike. It was on the outskirts of a small town, a place which consisted of a few neighbourhoods and was getting more and more desolate over the years. Neglected, but still so cozy and so heart-warming. She loved every house, every street, every yard, every garden, every door and every single window in this old neighbourhood. There couldn’t be a more cozy and homelike place, especially in summer, with its narrow streets drowning in emerald greenery of old trees and their emerald shadows, fresh dew-sprinkled grass in which the rays of the sun have lost their way, magnificent colourful flowers in the backyards and right at the windows of each house.

There was an old mine nearby where her grandfather used to work as a mechanic