He left a bottle of water and a TV dinner on the floor, then he walked out and locked the glass door behind him.

‘Thank you,’ she rasped.

He looked at her for the first time, and smiled, showing perfect teeth.

‘No sweat,’ he said.

When he was gone, she crawled over to the meal. She took one gulp of the water, and immediately threw up over the clean floor.

•

The camera became her friend.

When she wasn’t spreading her legs for it or gagging on something in front of it, she would talk to it. Tell it stories from her high school days. Like the time she had practised kissing on the bathroom mirror, and then seen the janitor cleaning it with the same mop he had just used to scrub the toilet bowls. She would tell it about Grandma Ivy, who would pretend to be deaf when telemarketers called and would leave her dentures in unexpected places as a prank. Ivy had been in hospital with emphysema when Abbey was abducted. Abbey sometimes prayed for her, and invited the camera to pray too. Being watched by strangers wasn’t as bad as being alone.

She didn’t tell the camera that she was a prisoner, and she never said anything negative about Shannon. She didn’t know when he was watching the feed. Every once in a while he would come in and do something to the back of the camera, changing a battery, maybe.

But whenever she was performing, she could assume that people were watching. Strangers around the world. So this was her chance to get a message out. But it would have to be something Shannon wouldn’t think was suspicious. She wouldn’t survive another punishment.

She dropped clues into every performance. People must know she was missing by now. Maybe her face and name were all over the TV. Maybe Shannon was even a suspect.

‘Hi, I’m Abbey,’ she said with a flirty smile, before demonstrating each toy.

‘Oh, Shannon,’ she would moan, every time she pushed some horrid new object up her ass. He would think she was trying to curry favour. He wouldn’t realise she was trying to make him a target.

When the police didn’t barge into the panic room after what felt like a week of this, she escalated things. She wished she knew Morse code, so she could stroke out a rhythm. She went to Google it. Remembered her phone was gone. In desperation, she scratched out a message on her own forearm with a fingernail. The angry red marks spelled out, HELP ME. She flashed it to the camera several times as she violated herself. She figured Shannon would be too busy watching her hands to notice the message further up her arm.