Free The Doll by Taylor Stevens Page A

pretty unlikely. Men didn’t do a whole lot of talking when they were getting themselvesoff, and whenever one of these Neanderthals did speak, it was only to grunt commands she didn’t understand or to swear at her, which she didn’t need to understand to know.
    They couldn’t have brought her here just to feed her crap food and touch themselves, not even if they knew who she was. She’d dealt with crazy fans, even psycho fans—it’s wasn’t as if she’d never gotten sick stuff in the mail. But no matter which way she strung it, and she’d had plenty of time to think it through, this just didn’t fit the psycho-ax-murderer-stalker-total-creep-fan concept.
    She’d kicked, fought, bit, and screamed, and not once had they hit her back. They wanted to—she could see that—sometimes it even seemed as if they would—but instead they’d retaliated by taking away the bucket that functioned as a toilet and tightening the chain so that she couldn’t reach the drain in the corner.
    She hadn’t seen that one coming.
    Then they took the blankets and without them she shivered constantly.
    The only good thing, if there could be a good thing, was that the worse the smell grew, the more they left her alone. It had been five meals since the last gorilla had dropped his pants. Oh, sure, they could get off just fine staring at her chained and degraded body. But now that she stank? Not so much.
    Assholes.
    A shadow filled the doorway but didn’t enter.
    Neeva waited. Eventually he’d come closer, they always did.
    With the door open, the incessant talking in the hallway was even louder. The noise was a lesson or something. Words in English and then in some other language, trading back and forth with the same blah-blah-blah that had been going nonstop at least four meals back, and which was a whole lot better than the sporadic crying she could hear before. Crying and screaming. Little girls, it seemed, or maybe teenagers. Sometimes the screams seemed older, crying out in a different kind of protest than the hell she was living here alone: hurt, desperate, hopeless. The words were never in English, and with the crying, they came and went, came and went, usually spaced between every five or six meals, until eventually there was nothing but the language lessons and what seemed like just one person down the hall.
    The guard’s silhouette filled the doorway again, and in his handwas a rope … a lasso. No, a hose. Neeva waited for him to come closer, but he wouldn’t. They’d grown wise to her tactics, knew what she would do, and he wouldn’t make himself a target.
    With a flick of the wrist, the shadow man raised the hose and an unexpected wave of water hit. The cold brought shock and pain, and Neeva screamed. The water hit her full in the face. He aimed not only at her but at the walls and the floor, as if he intended to flush the filth and smell down the grated drain in the corner, the same way a zookeeper cleaned the cages of his keep.
    She gasped and choked, and when the stream moved to her chest, screamed again, and still it didn’t stop. Not until the walls were wet, the floor was wet, her clothes clung to the shape of her body, and the pad she’d been sleeping on was thick and heavy.
    The water shut off, and the shadow left with the hose. He returned to the doorway, then entered and came close, and although she clawed to get away from him, she was chained and hurting, shivering, and had nothing to throw. He grabbed her head. She fought him. He pried her jaw open. She tried to bite. He squirted liquid down her throat and in a moment the strength went out of her.
    He stood looking down at her as she lay shaking on the waterlogged mattress, staring up at him while the world tilted at long angles. With disgust in his voice he spoke, and although she couldn’t understand his words, she grasped the intent:
Not such a tough one are you now, you filthy animal?

GATESVILLE, TEXAS
    It was nine in the morning when Bradford