After a few minutes, I was left alone in the dark cold room with nothing but the sound of water moving through the pipe my hands were tied to.
The cut on my arm from Gloria was still bleeding, but that was the least of my worries. How do I get out of here? What have I gotten myself into? A thousand thoughts filled my head as I tried to find a way to escape.
My hands were sore from the force I had been using to pull them from the pipe.
“What if I break it?” I thought to myself. It was a pipe with bolts. What if I used enough force to pull the bolts off? I began pushing and pulling with all my weight, but it felt hopeless. Instead of results, all I got was a strong headache.
“Enough!” Wayne screamed as he opened the door, entering with blankets.
“You can’t escape this, just stop trying,” he said. I looked up, realizing the pipe led to the house, meaning they could hear every sound I made.
“You’re right,” I said in a hush tone, feeling defeated as my heart sank. He walked over, knelt beside me, and covered me with a blanket.
“The plan is not to let you die of the cold,” he said in the softest voice.
“Thank you,” I replied, hoping to get on his better side.
“You know I only met Ethan months ago. I really don’t know him well enough to be the only person he holds dearly,” I explained, and he smirked, getting to his feet and moving away from me.
“You almost had a child with him, did you not?” he asked, and I nodded.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way, Emily,” he said, moving towards a screen I hadn’t noticed before.
“Let me show you the man who would have been the father of your child,” he said, turning on the screen.
I looked at the screen, and the first thing it showed was Ethan sitting in a dark room with someone kneeling in front of him.
“Please don’t kill me,” the man pleaded. It looked like an old footage from a hidden camera, and Ethan had a gun pointed at the man’s forehead.
“Spare me, I have a family,” the man pleaded. He looked injured, with blood dripping from his forehead.
“Family!” Ethan said in a devilish tone.
“Bring his wife,” Ethan commanded someone in the shadows, and a woman was tossed into the frame.
“Is she the reason you stole from me?” Ethan asked, and the man began to stutter.
“No, please, leave her alone. She knows nothing about our transaction,” the man’s voice filled with desperation.
Even through the screen, I could sense the fear in the man’s voice and see the woman trembling and letting out little sniffles.
“Please, please,” the man began to beg desperately as Ethan changed the direction of his gun to face the wife instead.
“Oh, shut up,” Ethan said with no remorse in his voice as he shot the wife.
The loud sound of the gunshot filled the air. The man turned to see his wife’s lifeless body fall to the ground. “You monster!” the man yelled, rushing at Ethan, who didn’t hesitate to shoot him too.
I gasped as I watched how heartless Ethan was. He looked different in the footage, younger, but it was definitely him.
“Clean this up and burn the house,” Ethan said heartlessly to the figure in the shadows.
“What about the children?” I heard a voice ask, and Ethan’s reply shocked me to the bone. “Kill them. Wipe out the whole family.”
My eyes widened in terror as I turned to face Wayne, whose eyes were glued to the screen. I noticed his eyes squinting slightly as if he was trying to prevent tears from falling.
“Is this real?” I wondered. Ethan could never be so heartless, I told myself, remembering the sweet man I fell in love with.
“Why are you showing me this? Do you want me to hate him?” I asked, wondering why he showed me such a disturbing video.
“Even if it’s real, this was his past. Everyone has a past. You can’t make me hate Ethan,” I tried to defend him, It was clear they wanted to break me, to make me hate Ethan before they killed me. But why?
“Past?” Wayne whispered before yelling.
“These were my parents!” Wayne’s voice deepened. “The kids your lovely Ethan wanted to kill were me and my brother Alfred. He was only five, and I was seven,” Wayne explained, his voice filled with rage.
“If you want to talk about his past, why don’t I show you the monster you love now,” Wayne said, moving to another video. In this one, Ethan was older, looking exactly as I remembered.
“Your Ethan is the king of the underworld,” Wayne explained as the video showed Ethan instructing people to load guns into a car.
“He controls all the gangs and criminals in the whole of Country. Didn’t you ever wonder how he made so much money?”
“This is how,” Wayne continued. As he spoke, I watched footage of Ethan being cruel, beating people up, and giving instructions to have people killed. Some videos I couldn’t even look at. He was indeed a monster.
“They were partners with my father, you know?” Wayne said to me as I raised my head to stare at him.
“They both worked for Gloria’s father. But when Ethan gained power, he abandoned my father and started giving him scraps. The only reason my father stole from him was because he wanted out. He wanted to start a clean life for us,” Wayne spoke, tears streaming down his face.
My eyes moved between him and the screen. How didn’t I know this about Ethan? I wondered, staring at the screen as I watched the man I had laid with do the most horrible things.
The screen finally paused on an image, the image of a man hanging naked in a cold room with blood being drained from his body.
“Do you remember this person?” Wayne asked, zooming in on the image. “This is how Ethan punishes people before he finally kills them. He hangs them in cold rooms and lets them suffer until he feels like ending it.”
As Wayne spoke, he continued to zoom in on the face, stopping when it became visible. As I saw the face, my heart sank, and I gasped.
“William.”