A sudden wave of something washed over Pat’s face then, his features instantly hardening so that they were stiff and rigid momentarily. “Pretty blonde lass?” he asked, too solemn for Minnie and Zach’s liking.
Minnie raised an eyebrow and tightened her grip on the handle of her knife. “Have you seen her, Pat?” she asked.
Pat laughed and shrugged, “no,” he said. “No, I’ve not seen her. Probably shacked up with one of the lads. Just a bit of harmless fun.”
Zach’s lips thinned as they tightened, and his fists clenched down by his sides. Minnie blinked and nodded, feigning stupidity as the stupid hillbilly tried to lie to her. She wasn’t dumb, not by any stretch. This guy knew something, something he wanted to hide. Something about that pretty blonde lass, her daughter. “Fancy coming back for a drink now, Pat?” smiled Minnie, flirting shamelessly with her eyes. “Ron won’t be back for some time, but there’s no reason we can’t start early, eh?”
Pat looked like a child who’d received all of his birthday presents at once.
Flo marvelled as she watched the man willingly walk alongside her mother, obedient as a lap dog. She kept her beady eyes fixed on the man’s grubby hands, his beefy fingers loosening their grip on his gun. No doubt he carried it purely to intimidate others or to make himself feel more impressive. But, with the bat of her eyelashes, her mother had removed this thin veil of pride from the foolish man, leaving nothing but an unsuspecting victim, trudging merrily along, right into her trap.
Chapter Thirty-five
Summer, 1999
Ronnie was awoken, for the first time in around twelve years, by the thick, unpleasant stench of piss invading and mercilessly attacking his nostrils. He shuddered, his sweat-covered skin jolting in the gloom, the insides of his mouth crackling and splitting from being so horrendously dry. He groaned, intense pain searing through his skull, drilling relentlessly into the base of his brain.
The teenager jerked his body and let out another involuntary moan as he felt the material of his trousers sticking uncomfortably to his thighs. He felt his cheeks burn red, even in the murky atmosphere.
He’d pissed himself.
Like a fucking animal.
With aching limbs, the young man shakily pushed himself up onto his feet, placing his palms against the darkened corner of the tiny room and using their surface to hold his balance.
Tears of horror leaked uncontrollably from the corners of his eyes as his disorientation quickly ebbed away. Terrifying memories quickly began to flood and overwhelm his senses in a deadly tsunami that spun and stormed chaotically through every inch of his body.
A pitiful croak projected from the back of his hopelessly parched throat. The sharp edges of the noise seemed to bounce against the four small walls, ricocheting back onto him like a group of taunting schoolyard bullies circling in, closer and closer. On his feet, he stumbled, blinking as he struggled to make sense of the dark shadows around him.
He was, he was certain, alone.
Half-naked, in agony, so dehydrated that he felt faint and stewing in his own filth. But definitely alone.
Crying, he moved around the walls, feeling their roughness beneath his fingers, pleading God for a way out or some kind of solution. He must’ve made a fair bit of noise because, within a few moments, the shrill echo of a key scraping against metal filled the space, causing him to freeze. Instinctively, his head snapped towards the sound just in time to see a door swing open, allowing a tall rectangle of light to flood into the room.
A rough, scrawny young man dragged a skinny woman into the room by her shoulders, releasing her so that her flimsy body collapsed onto the cold hard ground, like a sack of shit being left at the dump. Ronnie watched, stuck rigid and unable to move as the man pulled two plastic bottles from a sack and tossed them also onto the girl’s body, causing her to whimper and sob from her broken sprawl.
“Minnie,” Ronnie muttered, sinking down to his knees and crawling over to her desperately, enveloping her quickly in his stinking embrace.
Both of them shuddered as the door was slammed shut again, leaving them both there in the darkness. “Oh, Minnie,” he whispered. “What did they do to you?”
As he listened to his girlfriend’s muffled cries, he scrambled across the floor to pick up the water bottles. Hungrily, he practically ripped the cap off of the top of one and poured the liquid straight into his mouth so that the slightly stale water saturated his tongue and sloshed down his neck. Within seconds, he’d devoured the entire bottle and was sitting upright, struggling to regain his breath, contemplating opening the other.
It occurred to him then how stupid it’d been to demolish the water so quickly, with no idea how long it would be until they’d get more, if at all.
Biting back the bitter lump in his throat, he crawled back to Minnie and hugged her bent, cramped body tightly into his arms. He listened intently to the pounding of her heart and the painful, hoarse breaths that went in and out in irregular rasps from her lungs.
The last time he’d seen her was when she’d gotten into the house. The blonde German woman had brought her in, then knocked her unconscious with a cloth doused in some kind of poison. They’d dragged her away then and left him sitting, bleeding in that kitchen chair for what felt like a long, agonising eternity. He must’ve fallen asleep because his next memory was waking up there, in this damned room.
“It was awful,” she suddenly whispered, her voice like a blade cutting through her flesh. Her voice vibrated in a way against the inside of his arms that made fresh tears suddenly prick his own eyes, and a spike of pain surge up through his spine.
“What did they do?”
