SWNOVELS Fear The Reapers: Chapter 29
The days after my escape attempt blurred into each other. The semblance of freedom they had allowed before was gone, and in its place were the very real guards posted outside of my bedroom door.
They only allowed me trips to the restroom and only when Tristan, Cyrus, Atlas, and Ezra were nowhere in sight. Other than that, all of my privileges vanished.
The guys were smart. They changed the guards every day, so I never saw the same guard twice. Not that I would even try anything with them anyway, but they had themselves convinced that the only reason I had messed with Cyrus was to escape. I couldn’t even stomach the idea of them knowing the truth.
None of them would even as much as check in on me. It was like I no longer existed in their world. My room sat between Ezra’s and Tristan’s so I knew they hadn’t completely left. But the feeling of solitude was still very real and was slowly driving me insane.
Every time I’d hear a creak from the hardwood or a little cough from one of their rooms, my heart would pound in my chest and I’d feel the familiar rush of excitement each one of them elicited within me. I became obsessed with hearing those sounds. I knew I needed to change what was happening to me, before I succumbed entirely to the madness.
Day nine of total isolation is when it hit me, I needed to stop eating. I could survive days without eating, but they had no way of knowing that. I needed to get my point across to them somehow. If I could just talk to one of them, maybe I could get them to change their minds and allow me the freedoms I had before.
Three times each day the guards would knock on my door and leave a tray of food outside, and every single time I’d ignore their knocks and refuse to even look at it. I wasn’t completely destructive. I still took the water they brought me, but my hunger for freedom was stronger than any hunger pains I had to endure.
On day eight of my hunger strike, I laid myself out on the cool hardwood floor and tried to meditate the nausea away. The dizziness was hitting me in waves, but I knew I was close to making them crack. So close to having my freedom.
The night before, I’d heard Atlas scream at the guards when he noticed that my food hadn’t been touched again. It was the first reaction I’d gotten from any of them in almost two weeks, and with it, hope bloomed in my gut. They needed to think that I’d rather die than live like this because, in a lot of ways, being alone was killing me.
I closed my eyes as another pang of hunger hit my stomach. I could get through this, I just needed to be strong and distract myself. The first thought that came to my mind was to tell myself a story. It was what I did as a child, to help find peace at night after a tumultuous day with my mother.
I let out a deep breath and let my mind flow, searching for one of the many fairy tales I memorized as a child. The tale of Beauty and the Beast was the only story my mind could come up with, and I cursed at the irony.
Out of all the fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast was my least favorite as a child. I never understood what possessed Belle to love someone who was so undeniably awful to her.
She was beautiful and kind, and The Beast was bitter and cold. Her father being there was a complete misunderstanding, but the asshole of a beast didn’t care. He used her father’s mistake to his advantage, and he stole a girl he had no business taking.
After some time together, Belle began sympathizing with The Beast and before she knew it, he became the center of her universe. Someone she couldn’t fathom living without. She fell in love with a monster.
The similarities to my situation weren’t lost on me. Here I was obsessing over my own monsters. Falling so easily into my own distorted fantasy that I blatantly ignored the cold, hard facts.
The Reapers were bad people. Deranged killers who accepted a girl as payment for a fucking debt. Lying, cheating, and stealing were regular business practices for them. They didn’t understand the concept of boundaries and they saw me as nothing more than an object, something to play with whenever and wherever they wanted.
Yet for all their faults, deep down, I knew I was just as bad as they were. I didn’t care about the blood on their hands. I had no qualms about the punishments they dealt, and if I’d done my fair share of lying, cheating, and stealing in my own life to survive and in the grand scheme of things, that was what they were doing too. A sick part of me even enjoyed being owned by them, they felt like the family I never got to have.
But this wasn’t a fairy tale. The Reapers weren’t my knights in shining armor who were going to magically turn into princes if I just loved them enough. They were unapologetically themselves, and nothing I did was going to change that. The question was, was I willing to accept them for all that they were?
The question lingered in my mind even after the darkness started to cloud my vision. It didn’t feel like I was being pulled into a normal slumber, but I was tired of the pain and I knew if I gave in, the familiar nothingness that had always made me feel invincible would welcome me with open arms. So I went willingly and avoided answering the question I already knew the answer to.