Four

Bella opens her eyes, but she can barely see through the darkness. Since the moment that she traded her life for her father's freedom, she has feared the worst. She has expected it at any moment. Death.

When the large figure came towards her, she thought that was the moment when she would meet her demise. But he simply ran towards her and she fainted. When she came to moments later, she was being carried like a sack of flour over what she assumed was a shoulder.

The man marched through the trees and bushes, without regard for himself or her. Her skin was covered in bloody scrapes and stinging scratches. Dried blood crusted to her skin, which was red and chapped from the cold.

Her toes are swollen and stiff, from the extreme cold. She can not even bend them, they are so puffy. They are extremely painful for her as well.

When the man had carried her through a gate towards what looked to be an old medieval castle, she had prayed that she would at least get warm. Whatever he did to her or however he punished her, at least she would be warm. She would cling to that silver lining.

But then the man had walked into the light. And he was not a man. He was a monster. Bella recalls screaming in terror and then nothing. Blackness once more.

She has no idea how much time has passed until she opened her eyes. But she does know two things. First, warmth is out of the question, because she appears to have been thrown in some kind of cave.

Looking around, Bella's second realization is that she can not see anything. If she wants to escape, she is going to have to do it using her other senses, because the complete and total darkness has robbed her of her sight.

Reaching out, Bella feels the floor around her; her palms encountering the cold, hard dirt. She feels her way a few inches before she hits what feels like a wooden crate. When she inspects it blindly with her hands, she feels what feels like circles and triangles of smooth wax. But once she smells it, she realizes that it is cheese.

What kind of weirdo keeps a box of cheese in a cave?

Bella shrinks back away from it, freaked out. If there is a box of cheese beside her then it must be there for a reason. Until she figures out exactly what that reason is, she is not going to touch it.

She moves back into her corner, resting against the wall. The cold dampness of her surroundings is making her muscles ache and her skin burn. Her stomach is cramping and her chest hurts with each breath she takes. As much as she tries to stay awake, she simply can not. Her eyes drift shut.

Sometime later, Bella is startled awake by a scraping sound. She sluggishly opens her eyes, but she does not have the strength to move. Her limbs feel as heavy as concrete blocks and her muscle has seized upon her. Even crooking her finger causes her pain.

The sound comes again and Bella forces her eyes open wider. Suddenly a bright light shines through the darkness, burning her cornea. She closes her eyes quickly, but the sting makes her gasp. The sudden intake of breath triggers a coughing fit, which makes her whole body ache even more.

She has a deep, hacking cough that sounds horrible. Bella knows enough to know that the musty, damp air has probably given her pneumonia. Just like she figures the cramping is her organs shutting down due to the extreme cold. At the rate she is going, it is a toss-up as to which will kill her first, the hypothermia or pneumonia.

“Are you okay?”

A man's voice calls out from behind the blinding light and for a moment, in her delirium, fevered mind, she thinks that it is God coming for her. But then the light beams part and the concerned face of a young guy appears. Bella draws up into a ball, watching him warily.

The man comes down a set of wooden steps that descend from the hatch near the dirt ceiling. A quick glance around her at her surroundings shows that she was not in a cave. She was put in what appears to be a root cellar.

“Are you okay?” The guy repeats, watching her closely.

Bella, wary around him even though she can tell by the voice that he was not the monster that took her, does not respond. She merely shivers in response. Coming towards her, the guy lifts his hand towards the girl's face and lays his palm along her forehead. He jerks his hand back right away.

“Damn it, you're burning up! You will die down here if he isn't careful.”

The guy puts his hand on her legs and she kicks out at him, using the last bit of her failing strength that she could muster. “Hey now,” the man holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I'm not getting rapey with you or anything like that. My boyfriend would take great offense to that. I am just going to get you out of here before I have a rotting corpse beside the rotting cheeses.”

“Mmm..” Bella whimpers, trying to move away from him. She does not know him or trust him. Although he is being somewhat kind to her, she has no idea what to do with him being kind. Is it genuine or is it some ploy to get her to drop her guard?

“Come on, girl. I have no plans to hurt you. Or I don't know, don't they say 'I mean you no harm' in the movies? Cause I really have no nefarious motives. You will die down here if you don't come with me and believe it or not, I really don't want that to happen to you.” The man tells her, holding out a hand for her to take.

Bella thinks about her options. She can stay in the cellar and she will die for sure, as the cold air grows the bacteria in her lungs and the freezing temperatures slow the blood flow through her body until her organs freeze and shut down. Or she can take her chances with trusting this man and maybe die a quick death. Or maybe he means what he says and she lives. Either way, it beats the certainty of death if she stays.

So Bella puts her hand in his.

“Atta girl!” The man says, tugging on her until she falls into his arms. He slides a thick forearm beneath her knees and the other arm goes behind her back. He helps her lift her arms around his neck. “Hold on tight. It definitely won't make you feel better if I drop you to the ground, now will it?”

“Please.. don't..” Bella croaks out, trying to muster up a smile.

He chuckles. “No problem, darlin'. You weigh less than a baby. I don't think I am going to have a problem holdin' on to you.”

She is scared as he starts up the stairs with her, fearing that he will in fact drop her as he had joked about before. But he makes it up the stairs with no issues. Bella wants to look around at her surroundings to see where she is, but she can not muster the strength to lift her head from his chest.

“I am going to take you to a room-”

“What the fuck do you think you are doing?” Comes an angry bellow from somewhere behind them. The deep roar of his voice terrifies Bella and she begins to cough. Her vision goes blurry and her head begins to feel floaty. As she sees a large shadowy figure moving towards them, she nestles closer to the man and closes her eyes.

The darkness overtakes her once more.

Bella swims in and out of consciousness. She will wake up for a few moments here and there, but she is barely lucid. One of the times that she wakes up she hears an older woman speaking.

“She has double pneumonia. Her cough is getting worse, not better. The hypothermia, dehydration, malnourishment, and infections are only making matters worse. She is really bad off, Lumi. There is a high chance that she does not make it.”

“Come on, Fleur. She is a child. She is probably, what? Sixteen or so? We can not let her die.”

“Seve-”

Bella's words only turn into another coughing fit that pushes her back into the land of oblivion. When she wakes up again she is surrounded by darkness and she fears that she is back in the root cellar.

The warmth of the blankets still tucked around her body assure her that she is still in a room. The thing that bothers her is that she has no idea what room it is, where she is or how is around her. She is the prisoner of a beast and she is surrounded by strangers.

Worst of all, she has no idea how long she has been there or how her father is. For all she knows, he is still laying in the snow in the middle of the woods. Bella just hopes and prays that he is still alive. The one thing that will get her through all of this is the hope that one day she will be back with her father and spook.

A coughing spell chokes her up until she is hanging over the side of the bed, with tears streaming from her eyes. Her chest is hurting so badly that it hurts to take even a shallow breath and she fears that all the coughing has pulled a muscle in her stomach.

The door pushes open and a sliver of light falls across the foot of the bed. A large figure looms in the doorway, but with the light coming from behind him, she can not make out his features. But there is something very familiar about him, she just can not put her finger on it.

Until he speaks.

“Here.”

He is across the room in mere seconds, shoving a glass of water in her face. His voice is a growl and she knows immediately why he looked familiar. He is the man that hurt her father and took her. He is the monster.

Bella jerks away from him, ignoring the pained protest of her battered body. But as she moves away, he comes closer. He bandishes the water at her, moving the glass towards her even as she retreats. “Take this. Now.” Comes his irritated growl.

“N-n- no..”

A deep, rumbling growl of displeasure thunders out from his throat, frightening her. She whimpers in fear, moving back even further. Sadly, the expanse of the bed behind her was limited and she falls to the floor. The hard thud vibrates through her whole frame, enflaming pains that she had hoped had healed.

“Oww..”

“Well, that was damn stupid, even for you.” Comes the irritated voice once more and she falls flat on her back, giving in to the discomfort that she now feels in every part of her body.

“Please- just leave me to die..” She mumbles beneath her breath, too quiet for anyone to hear.

“I would love to.” Comes the honest reply. “But then I would never hear the fucking end of it and you are not worth the headache that I would get. So, get your ass back in the bed and drink the damn water.”

“I- I can't-”

“And why not?” He demands loudly, letting Bella hear the exasperation in his voice.

“I- I- need a minute..” She says quietly, as tears spring to her eyes.

She feels broken and bruised with her whole body hurting, she is terrified of everyone and everything around her, but worse than that, she misses her father. So right now, Bella just wants to lie on the cold floor and cry out all of her heartbreak. The last thing that she is worried about is that monster or his potential headache.

In fact, right about now she is wishing that he gets such a debilitating headache that he can not leave his bed for a month. By then she will either have been killed or she will have escaped, but either way, she would no longer have to deal with him.

“No.”

“W-w- what?”

Bella is sure she must not have heard him right. What does it matter to him if she lays on the floor? For that matter, why is he even in here with her? He left her to die. Why would he come around her now, unless it was to finish the job? Suddenly Bella is very suspicious of the water in his hands.

But before she can say anything, two strong hands are gripping her roughly by the upper arms and lifting her from the floor. Tossed none too gently on the bed, she cowers back against the pillows, pulling the blankets over her as if they offer her some form of protection.

Shoring up her courage, she lifts her eyes up from the covers to see the monster. And she gasps. Because while she expected a beast or a hideous monster, what she finds is an extremely attractive man.

“What?” He growls and she turns her eyes away from him, afraid that she had stared at him. How embarrassing.

“I'm not going to freaking eat you!”

Bella's eyes widen, fearing that he misinterpreted her look and his mind jumped to the wrong conclusions. Dirty conclusions.

“Ex- excuse me?” Bella asks, not looking at him for fear that she will make a fool of herself.

“You are looking at me like Little Red Riding Hood staring up at the big, bad wolf. But it's a common expression heard in the south. I'm not going to eat you for dinner, so you can stop staring up at me with that look of sheer terror. It's annoying.” He tells her, moving back from her.

“Sorry.”

“Just drink the damn water.”

“No!” Bella bursts out, then blushes, covering her mouth with her hand quickly. “I- I mean- uh, no thank you..”

Even though all of the speaking that she has done has ravaged her dry throat, making it ache, she can not force herself to drink the water. She does not care that her mouth is so dry that her tongue feels thick and she has to fight back a gag with each word. Or that her voice is so raspy that she sounds like a trucker that smoked all his life.

“Why not?” He asks her angrily.

“Um.. my bladder..” She begins, panicked, only to stop when she realizes what she said and to who she said it.

“You have to piss. Why the fuck didn't you say so?” He points to a door across the room that she can only make out the outline of in the darkness. “There is a bathroom. It has no windows and no other doors, so you won't be able to escape, but you can relieve yourself in there.”

“Uh.. thanks,” Bella says. She actually does need to use the restroom but there is no way that she is going to go in there with him still in the room.

“Well?” He asks her impatiently.

“Well, what?” She croaks out.

“Get your ass up and go to the bathroom!” He shouts at her, making her pull the covers over her in fear.

She doesn't know if it is the exhaustion mixed with her highly emotional state or if she is having a mental breakdown that attributes to the episode, but the next thing that she knows she is curled up in a ball, sobbing hysterically as the man stands over her growling in anger.

Which only makes her more upset.

“What did you do?!”

The guy from before is there, pushing her hair back from her face and cupping her cheek. “Hey, hey. It's okay..”

“I merely spoke to her! The bit-”

“Hey.” Comes a woman's warning voice.

“The girl is fucking crazy! She just started squalling for now reason.”

“Yes, and I am sure that you were being a perfect gentleman to her.” The woman can be heard saying.

Bella can not stop crying, as the tears flow from her eyes and the sobs rack her body. She merely pulls the blankets higher around her face. The guy who helped her before continues to stroke her hair, as if she were a sick child.

“I-I-.. w*- w*nt.. my d-dad..”

“Oh, honey.” The man says. Then a gentle hand is stroking her back as the woman mutters, “The poor dear.”

“Stop coddling her!” Comes an angry bellow, stopping everyone in their tracks. Even Bella, who stops crying. “She is my prisoner! She is not to be made on over or fawned on like the damn Queen of England. She will spend her days here, repaying me for her crimes!” He booms.

“But Adam-”

“Leave!” He shouts.

And to Bella's dismay, both the woman and the guy leave the room, where she remains alone with the beast. She does not look at him and he does not care.

“I don't care if you drink or not. I do not care in the least if you take care of yourself. You will stay in this room until you die. If that comes sooner rather than later, then I will have your body tossed into the ravine outback. I will offer you no kindness and from this moment on, neither will anyone else in my household. Food and drink will be left for you, eat it or not. I don't give a damn either way.”

The slam of the door shakes the room, then the darkness and silence closes in around her once more.

All she can do is cry.