She screams as he pins her to the floor with a large hand at her back, and he tugs his pants down.

And then I get a front row fuckin’ seat to him shoving himself inside her, to all of the fucked up shit he did to her. And no amount of screaming, pleading, or yanking on my restraints does either one of us any good.

And he’s right. It really does feel like dying.

She bites her lip until it bleeds, trying to keep it in, trying to keep that shit together, but in the end he wants her screams, and that’s what he gets.

And what do I get in return? The image of her blood and tears decorating the concrete, of her beautiful face twisted in pain, and the suffocating knowledge that I can’t save her. I have two hands, all bloody and ripped to shreds from trying to get out of my cuffs. I’ve gone a good ways to de-gloving my left hand with all the fighting I’ve done, and now I’m in a world of pain.

But it isn’t just my hand that hurts. It’s my heart. Because I’m not enough. I couldn’t protect her. I’d been careless; I wasn’t paying attention, and I let this arsehole get the jump on me, but more than that, I’ve just watched the woman I love get raped by her own father, and I couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing to stop it. I couldn’t save her, and that shit is gonna haunt me for the rest of my goddamned life.

“Ivy,” I whisper. She’s still lying naked on the ground where he left her. She’s in shock. Her teeth chatter; her body tremors from head to toe. “Ivy. Baby, look at me,” I plead, and she slowly lifts her head from the floor to stare at me.

I rattle the cuffs against the iron bar, and wince as the metal slides over my raw flesh. All the skin has been stripped away right down to the first joint of my thumb. I’m pretty sure my thumb broke too. I should’ve been able to work the cuff over my broken knuckle then and slip free, but the more I pulled, the more the metal embedded itself in my flesh. And now it’s swollen so far there ain’t a goddamn thing I can do about it. That whole arm feels like a live wire. I wrenched it so hard, I probably tore a muscle or two.

“I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry,” I whisper. I know she can hear me, because her lip quivers and tears roll down her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything, just lies her head back down on the concrete.

“I need your help. I can’t get my hand out,” I say, and in the stillness of the room I hear my voice, tired and weak, defeated, as if it belonged to another. “I’m gonna need you to work on that rope and then come help me here.”

She shakes her head. It’s a very small movement but it feels larger than life, because it means giving up. And despite the shame and hatred I feel that I couldn’t stop it, I won’t let her give up. I’ve never given up on anything in my entire life. Even with the cuff, I haven’t given up. I’m physically incapable of getting it off my wrist because the fuckin’ thing is embedded, but that doesn’t mean I’d stop tryin’. The choice is clear here. I can’t watch that again; I can’t let her go through that again. So I’ll break every bone in my fist to get free, but if I want hands to be able to kill her father with, I’ll need her help. “Come on, Warrior Princess. I fuckin’ need you, babe.”

“I can’t,” she murmurs. “I can’t. I should never have run. I shouldn’t fight him.”

“Bull-fucking-shit you shouldn’t fight. You get your sweet arse up and you start working on that rope. I don’t care if it takes all fuckin’ day. I don’t care if your fingers bleed and your whole body is so tired you just wanna lay down and die. You work on that shit until you’re free, and then you come over here and help me with these cuffs.”

“I can’t,” she says, and she turns her face away from me and weeps into the floor. I slam my head back against the wall, wondering if she isn’t right. Maybe we’re screwed either way. All I know is that I can’t watch her get raped again.

Much later, when the crying has stopped and she’s had several hours of fitful sleep, I drift into my own state of restless slumber, but I’m woken by scratching, and the frustrated gasps from Ivy attempting to loosen the knots on her leg rope. No sound comes from the TV upstairs, there’s no creak of floorboards above us, just silence.

“That’s it, baby. Just keep going,” I say.

“It’s not budging,” she huffs, and exhales her exasperation loudly.

“You’re doin’ just fine, Warrior Princess.”

“You know I used to have days down here. Some days I didn’t want to escape, because I wasn’t sure what was waiting for me on the outside, and others I just didn’t have the strength. I had nothing to fight for.” She looks at me and frowns. “I still don’t.”

“You got me. I know I’m no fuckin’ prize. I’m a bastard, and I push you to do things you don’t want to, and I’m a cunt when I’m hungry, but you have me,” I say, and I wish more than anything that I could have held her as I said those words, as if it somehow would have given them more weight. “You’ve always had me … for what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth,” she says solemnly, and goes back to working on the rope.

I wish it were true, but the fact is I promised to keep her safe, and I failed. I fucked up, and the two of us—well, we’ll pay for it for the rest of our lives.

Sometime later, after picking at it for hours with bleeding fingers and lifted nails and blisters that are red raw, Ivy finally frees her leg from its tether, and looks at me with wide-eyed wonderment, though I can clearly see her fatigue.

“I did it,” she whispers, and I can’t help but grin, because even weakened and exhausted as she is, her eyes are lit with fire. With hope.

“Get over here,” I whisper back, and she scrambles off the bed and gingerly walks over to me. She carefully climbs into my lap and I’ve never regretted the loss of the use of my hands so much, because I can’t hold her right now the way I want to. I pepper her face and hair with kisses and she takes mine in her hands, careful to avoid my black eye, and the laceration at the corner of my mouth.

“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry,” I whisper into her hair. A lump forms in my throat and tears spill out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks. I haven’t cried since I was a boy, but now that the floodgates have opened, I can’t seem to stop them. I don’t much care either. “I couldn’t do anything. I tried, I nearly took the skin off my fuckin’ hand, but I couldn’t protect you.”

“Shh. It’s okay. Shh.” She kisses my forehead, my cheeks, tastes my tears, and then she glances at my hand, and the revulsion and pity on her face almost flattens me. “Oh God, Tank. It looks bad.”

“Yeah, it’s about to get worse,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I hope you haven’t got a weak stomach, darlin’, ’cause I’m gonna need your help.”

I never told another living soul about my mother’s murder. I was too afraid. I was afraid he’d find out, and that he’d kill me too. Some days, I fantasised about it. When I’d spent my childhood locked down in this basement, I’d dreamed of breaking out and telling someone all the horrible things my father had done to me, to my mother, and to the boy across the street. But I never told, because I never had an opportunity to, and when I did finally escape, I was free—if only in the physical sense of the word. I’d never be mentally free. He’d made sure of that.

He made sure that I’d never think of another man again when they fucked me. Even with a clubhouse full of men. Even when it’d just been Tank and me alone in his room, I’d never seen the man in front of me. I’d seen my father, and the years of repression and the pain that he’d taught me to crave. I was sick, and I’d loved every second of it, because it was all I’d ever known. It was what I was bred to know, it was what I’d become accustomed to, and it was safe.