Chapter 86 – A Bottomless Pit
**Julia POV.**
**THREE YEARS EARLIER.**
Amelia’s voice sounded as damp as the air inside her cell. She smelled of rot and decay that drifted all over the place. For a second, I thought I saw her eyes flash silver — not with fear, but with something far older and more primal.
I stood stunned, left speechless by her unexpected pleas and sobs.
Her words carried a strange weight, one that made me freeze despite every instinct screaming at me to ignore them. I remembered the warden’s words — inmate 969 deceives and lies — and felt conflicted about how my response should be.
The two burly guards, meanwhile, just stood there and snickered wickedly.
“What … what do you mean?” I stuttered after a while, managing to regain my composure.
“Help me get out of here,” Amelia whispered loudly this time. “Save me from these vultures! They do bad things to me all the time. They lift up my dress under the pretext of conducting a body search. They finger me, torture me, terrorise me. They … they …”
She broke down in an uncontrollable loud sob that sent shivers down my spine.
My lips thinned into a grim line. For a split second, I hesitated. But uncertainty had no place in this bottomless pit of a prison city, so I shoved it down and resolutely checked my emotions.
“I am sorry, Amelia, but getting you out of here is not even a possibility,” I replied firmly. “But how did you end up here? I want to know.”
Something about her pleas, her look, and this whole situation felt wrong. It didn’t feel natural.
Amelia stood up. She moved with an eerie grace that seemed almost too perfect, too deliberate, and too impeccable.
“Why have you come to see me, then, if not to rescue me?” she asked in a perfectly normal tone.
I was taken aback by this sudden change in her demeanor and tone. Pleading and sobbing a moment earlier, she now looked as calm and composed as the lull before a storm.
“Because … because I came to know you are incarcerated here, and —”
“And that made your heart melt? Or, did you find it impossible to ignore the desire to rejoice in my misery?” her voice cut through the stale putrid foul smell of the dungeon and hit me hard in the face.
A jolt ran down my spine, making me want to snap back at her, to remind her who was incarcerated and who was visiting. But I resisted the urge and put up a brave face instead.
Her calm, infuriatingly unreadable face had already made me skeptical of her pleas and claims of being tortured.
“It seems I shouldn’t have come here,” I replied, forcing steel into my voice. “You have always been a vicious beast, Amelia, and you will never change.”
Amelia clenched her jaw. It seemed she was fighting the urge to snap back and scream at me.
“Your words won’t hurt me,” she snapped, her calm exterior giving way to her latent hostile self. “I have no feelings left for you, never did. And having spent the last ten years of my life in this abyss, I have become immune to taunts and barbs.”
“I have no doubt about that,” I responded with ridicule. “What I wanted to know is how you ended up here in the first place?”
“Wrong question,” Amelia turned in my direction. Her eyes weren’t dark anymore. Instead, they glowed a striking silver. “How I survived this place would be the right question to ask.”
“Okay,” I gave in. “How did you?”
“By doing everything needed to survive,” she stepped closer to the guards, flashing a faint, humorless smile. “I let them finger me, lick me, fuck me, and play out their darkest fantasies on me.”
She rubbed her palms on their crotch, grinning a depraved smile, her eyes twinkling in vulgar satisfaction. “They will do anything I ask them to once they are aroused,” she uttered in a low but forceful voice. “And they are aroused now, aren’t you, studs?”
The guards leered lecherously and grunted in perverse pleasure.
She took their hands and inserted them under the hem of her tunic. “Show me whose finger is fatter,” she cooed seductively.
Depravity was writ large on the faces of the guards as they succumbed to their dormant urges and primitive desires. Their hands began to move incessantly under her tunic, while Amelia writhed and moaned obscenely.
A cold knot tighetened in my stomach at this lewd display of perversion. I stood up and made my way to the exit.
“Goodbye, Amelia,” I paused for a second to utter those words. “Hope we never see each other again.”
“Not so fast, honey!” she screeched like a banshee. “My boys — these two — would love to shove their fingers inside you, like they are doing to me now. Won’t you, boys?”
The two giant men withdrew their hands from under her tunic and approached me slowly.
“And they have very fat fingers,” cackled Amelia from her position. “High on lust, low on manners, that’s what they are. Julia, you are in deep shit now!”
Before I could figure out what was happening, those two filthy beasts grabbed me by my arms and dragged me inside the cell.
“Welcome to Valley Ridge, dear sister!” Amelia jeered at the top of her voice. “This is a one-way street. You can enter but you can’t escape. You were doomed the moment you set foot in this hellhole. Now, you will spend the rest of your life locked up here, doing exactly what I have been doing the past few years — surviving.”