Madness. I was starting to become affected by all the other craziness going on here.
When Mona Sierra returned, sooner than I would have liked, her fingertips were healed. Unblemished, unscarred skin. The people that had been milling around gathered into attention once again.
Pulling a knife from the sheath at her waist, Mona Sierra walked up to Dante and without ceremony sliced him across the abdomen. It seemed like a small cut until the blood started streaming, a crimson tide flowing out in a line that slowly widened into a wash of blood as his tissues opened up. I glimpsed a deeper layer of fat and cut muscle as she made a second slice, chillingly silent. No sound. No cries from Dante, or even me—I was too shocked. It didn’t seem real to me until the loops of his bowel spilled out of him. Then it was all too real.
I screamed and twisted against my ties so that they creaked and strained. The silver ropes binding my arms broke. I was dropping forward, my upper body free, when a dart pierced my neck. I yanked it out, tried to aim it at a hunter—there were so goddamn many of them—but already lethargy was assailing me. A tingling numbness spread outward from the tiny wound in a rapid wash of weakness, and I sprawled limp, elbows on the ground. A haze of darkness and sparkly lights filled my vision, but I didn’t pass out. I clung to consciousness, barely. After a second or two, my vision cleared and returned.
“The diluted venom seems to work. Good,” Mona Sierra said with satisfaction. “I want you to see this.”
“Why?” I mumbled—it felt like marbles filled my mouth.
“Because your distress will pain him even more.” She nodded to a man who was clothed more than the others, wearing shirt and shoes as well as pants. He stepped before Dante and pulled the edges of his eviscerated abdomen together, with the intestinal loops still trailing out of him. Even in my dulled state, I felt the wash of energy coming from his hands. When he drew his hands away, the gaping wound was sealed back together, all but a central area, an inch-and-a-half-wide hole, where Dante’s intestines spilled out of him.
“It will get even tighter as your own body heals,” Mona Sierra said, trailing her fingers over the intestinal loops, smearing Dante’s blood on them as though she were finger painting. “They tell me it’s quite painful, feeling your guts being sucked back into you as you heal, which should take several long hours.” She wrapped a small hand around the bunched loops, pulling gently. No sound came from Dante, but his face grew more ashen. “Quite a skill to eviscerate without cutting into the loops themselves. A nasty smell, I’ve found, when you perforate the bowels. This way is much better, cleaner.” She smiled up at him with quiet ecstasy, drinking in his stoic pain. Sticking her finger into the hole, she stroked inside him.
I gagged, watching her, as two hunters bound me again to the pole.
This was one sick chick!
She glanced from me back to Dante. Her scary smile grew even wider as she purred, “Oh, how much fun this will be.”
She tortured him like this throughout the night. Watching his entrails squeeze slowly, painfully back in, pulling them back out. When the last small loop finally slithered back inside him, it was almost anticlimactic. I kept expecting the crazy bitch to slice him back open and spill them out again. I think Dante did also, because his face remained as expressionless as mine was wildly expressive, as blank as mine was by turns sickened, angry, then pitiful, and always, always frightened. For both him and me.
So far Mona Sierra had limited her interactions to having Raúl—the guy with the red eye painted on his forehead—shoot me with a dart me every two hours with attenuated venom. It left me in a groggy, limp state. Alert but helpless to do anything. I had a strong feeling that had it not been for the necklace I wore, the necklace that had burned her fingertips black, Mona Sierra would have tortured me as well, just to get a response out of Dante—he had shown far more interest for my well-being than his own. For himself, he had bargained not at all, opened his mouth not once on his own behalf. Just kept his slitted eyes—the swollen eye had finally healed—focused on Mona Sierra with his last words lingering in the air: his promise to seek vengeance if she did not let me go.
I think all of us were waiting to see which way she would go on that, including Mona Sierra herself. Would she let me go or kill me?
Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon when they finally untied Dante from his pole. Two men unwound my bindings as well, though they kept our hands tied. No matter, as long as they were through for the night. Couldn’t torture us while they were sleeping, right? Which I presumed they would be, since they’d been up all night. Only, it seemed they could.
It didn’t occur to me what they were doing until I was standing over the pit. One of the men hefted me over his shoulder and walked a fair distance before setting me back on my feet. I had a moment to see the deep, crater-sized hole before I collapsed in a jellied mass on the ground, unable to stand, not even able to lift up my head. The multiple doses had accumulated within me. I was doped up to my gills at this point.
“Carry her down,” Mona Sierra ordered Dante.
It seemed an innocuous thing to ask of him, but Dante reacted as if she had just told him to stab me in the heart. The expression on his face grew frightening and his body seemed to swell larger, even though he didn’t move a single muscle. It wasn’t my drugged imagination either, because the six men surrounding him stepped back and drew their machetes.
“You will regret this,” Dante promised, icy rage flashing from his pale eyes.
“Not as much as you will,” Mona Sierra said smugly, “and that is all I care about. Maybe if you had given me a better show, I might have spared her, but you were such poor entertainment.”
“Lies,” I managed to slur out. “Bitch jus wansa torment you.”
Mona Sierra cast a venomous glance at me. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. He’ll never know. And that will indeed torment him as you and he boil under the sun. As he watches your skin blister and peel away.”
Oh, so that’s what she had planned. I blinked and kept my mouth shut. Sunlight didn’t bother me. Sunlight, in this case, was my dear, dear friend. It would give me time for the venom to wear off and let me recover my full strength, after which I’d break us out of this creepyville of horror.
“You can carry her down, or I will have her thrown down,” Mona Sierra said indifferently. “Your choice.”
Dante scooped me up and set me over his shoulder much more gently and carefully than the other man had. I hung over him like a limp rag as he descended the ladder, two men in front of him, another two behind. We went down twenty-eight rungs before hitting the bottom, and it was a tricky bit of work for Dante because his hands were tied together in front and he couldn’t hold me as he climbed down. I couldn’t even help. Another treacherous mind game Mona Sierra played with Dante—more guilt to heap upon him if I slipped off his shoulder and fell. But we made it down without mishap.
“Over there,” Raúl said, pointing.
Dante moved to the indicated spot and set me down on the cool cement floor. Dante’s eyes, the brief glimpse I had of them, were wild with anguish, turmoil, and rage. More emotion than he had shown throughout the entire night of tug-of-war Mona Sierra had played with his intestines.
“Step back away from her,” Raúl commanded.
I think Raúl and I were both surprised when Dante obeyed without putting up a fight. I watched as he let Raúl’s men untie his hands, only to retie them behind his back. They attached a long silver rope to his bound wrists and then secured the other end to a metal rung anchored into the concrete.