You took my heart, could I please have it back?

[56] You took my heart, could I please have it back?

{Liz POV}

 

Time went by really slowly down in that cellar. Minutes seemed like hours, hours seemed like days. This worried me. How long would it take for my father to alert the police who had stabbed him? Lily hadn’t stopped fretting either, apart from that brief moment earlier.

Lily and I were both getting hungry. Would he feed us? Or would he just leave us down here to starve? I was getting more and more anxious. Why were we even here? Why was he targeting us? I understood that perhaps he was doing it for Nicola – him calling me a stupid bitch was proof enough of that – but why target my father too?

Sighing, I curled into a tighter ball on the floor, trying to keep in the heat. Lily was pacing near me, and I noticed through the gloom that her hands were shaking. I unfurled myself and stood up, wrapping my arms around my best friend in a comforting hug. She stopped pacing and hugged me back, her face buried in my shoulder.

“How long have we been here?” she mumbled miserably against my shoulder. I sighed again.

“I have no idea. A few hours, I guess,” I replied, my eyes fixed on the rows of bottles behind her. Questions ran through my mind but I ignored them for now and focused on wishing for someone to come and help us.

What was my dad doing? Surely he must have told someone by now. And it couldn’t take the police long to find out where the Moore’s lived. Maybe the police didn’t deem it as a missing person’s case because we hadn’t been gone longer than 24 hours. Come on dad, I thought desperately. Get us out of here.

We were both startled into looking up when there was the unmistakable clicking of a key turning, and then the scrape of the door. Lily and I both winced as daylight hit our eyes, now accustomed to the dark dank of the cellar.

Adrian came down the stairs empty handed and I inwardly sighed. No food. He stood in front of us, his eyes glaring, daring us to make a break for it. Neither of us were good at PE or running, so we didn’t try. I cursed my lack of fitness as he started speaking.

“I don’t want to stink the house out so I’ll let you use the bathroom, one at a time, twice a day,” he said gruffly, and didn’t say anymore. He gripped Lily’s wrist tightly and she whimpered as he began to pull her up the stairs. I presumed he’d stand guard.

It was probably only a couple of minutes that they were gone but it felt like ages, cooped up alone with no one to talk to, not knowing what was happening, when I’d get out. Even for those couple of minutes, I realised that it really was more heartening to have someone with you, no matter how pessimistic they were.