Maybe she already is.
When the cloud had first been blown towards her, Maria had recoiled in the manner that one might react to a sneeze. Poison went up her nose, dazed her eyes, left her coughing on the sick-sweetness of it as she breathed it in. It wasn’t her first time being dosed, but she didn’t love it any more for the familiarity. It was as if this family saw her as nothing more than some sort of sick toy. Leaving razor-thin lines of welling blood on her skin, berating her for being foolish enough to ever wander onto their land. Alternating calls of stupid and sugar, until she was too tired to even react.
If she was dead, she was sure that this would be hell. The only thing missing was the sweltering fires blazing against her skin: but who could say if one of these visits, one of her captors wouldn’t appear wielding a branding iron. The sizzle of it against her skin would certainly measure up to hell enough.
Now, though, she’s too lost in another drug-fuelled haze to think. The world warps around her, twists and bends back on itself until she can’t be sure that she isn’t hung upside down. Colours ring in her ears, she thinks her brain might have drained right out of her skull, and when that voice appears, Maria’s expression contorts as she hides her face against her upper arm. There’s no cry of terror, no pleas for mercy: just her paled, sweaty skin, nose pressing to her shoulder as her eyes scrunch shut hard enough to hurt.
Colours still dance behind her eyelids, though- a sickening kaleidoscope that promises she won’t find any escape, not any time soon. That voice echoes behind her eyelids, too, and Maria can’t force it out. It whispers again and again, chasing her as she tries to burrow further into her own skin, and unwillingly towards the very predator taking so much pleasure from playing with her.
“Please.”
Finally, her own voice escapes. Cracked and ugly, warped by too little water and too much tortured begging. “Please, just stop. Just leave me alone.”
It never works. Never, not once – but asking is all that she can do.
