Chapter 8: The Price of Silence

The basement door slammed shut behind me like the final nail in a coffin.

I stood frozen on the cold concrete steps, heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. The only light came from the thin gap under the door above — a cruel, mocking sliver that disappeared the second Victor turned the key.

Darkness swallowed me whole.

I counted my breaths the way I’d learned in therapy years ago. One… two… three… Don’t panic, Eden. You’ve survived worse than the dark.

But I hadn’t. Not really.

Because this wasn’t just darkness. This was Victor’s darkness. The kind that had teeth.

“Scared yet, little bird?” His voice drifted down from the top of the stairs, muffled but dripping with satisfaction. “You should be.”

I pressed my back against the wall, fingers searching for anything — a light switch, a weapon, a way out. Nothing. Just cold brick and the faint metallic smell of blood that never quite left this place.

Then I heard it.

A soft, rhythmic scraping from the far corner.

Not rats. Worse.

Chains.

My stomach lurched. “Who’s there?”

Silence.

Then a voice — cracked, broken, female — whispered through the dark:

“Run… while you still can.”

I spun toward the sound, eyes straining against the black. “Who are you?”

Another scrape. Closer this time.

“I was you,” the voice rasped. “Three months ago.”

My knees nearly buckled.

Victor hadn’t been lying. There were others. There had always been others.

The chains stopped moving.

And then the lights flickered on.

I screamed.

Curled in the corner, wrists raw and bleeding from iron cuffs bolted to the wall, was a woman I recognized from missing person posters I’d seen months ago. Her name was Chloe. Her face had been everywhere — smiling in family photos, begging the world to find her.

Now she looked like a corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet.

Her hair was matted with blood and filth, her cheekbones sharp from starvation, but her eyes — God, her eyes were still alive. Still fighting.

She stared at me like I was a ghost.

“You’re… new,” she whispered, voice barely audible.

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

Victor’s voice crackled through an intercom mounted high on the wall:

“Meet Chloe. She used to think she could leave me too. Didn’t you, darling?”

Chloe’s dry lips cracked into something that might have been a smile. “He likes to watch us break slowly. Says it’s more… intimate.”

I backed away until the wall stopped me. “I’m getting us out. Both of us.”

She laughed — a sound like breaking glass. “That’s what I said on day one. Day ten. Day fifty.”

The lights cut out again.

Darkness.

Chains.

And somewhere above us, Victor began to hum the lullaby my mother used to sing.

I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the freezing floor, arms wrapped around my knees. My phone was gone. My shoes were gone. My hope was slipping through my fingers like sand.

But I wasn’t Chloe.

Not yet.

I forced myself to crawl toward her voice, hands outstretched in the dark until my fingers brushed cold metal. The chain.

“How long have you been down here?” I whispered.

“Long enough to forget what sunlight feels like,” she answered. “Long enough to stop screaming.”

I found her hand — skeletal, ice-cold — and squeezed. “Then we scream together.”

For the first time, her fingers squeezed back.

Above us, the humming stopped.

Footsteps.

The lock turned.

The door opened.

Light poured in like judgment day.

Victor stood at the top of the stairs, silhouetted, holding something in his hand.

A knife.

And behind him, tied to a chair in the hallway, gagged and wide-eyed — was Maya.

My best friend.

The person I’d come here to save.

Victor smiled down at us both.

“Welcome to the family, Eden,” he said softly. “Now the real fun begins.”

He started down the stairs.

One step.

Two.

Three.

And the door slammed shut behind him.