"If you wanted to give me an early birthday present, you could leave me here for an hour or so."

"You're lucky you get the minute. Maybe not even that much." Ken walked over to the doorway. "Don't do anything until I'm upstairs. We don't want the neighbors to hear."

Ken left, shutting the door behind him. Charlene assumed this meant there was also an upstairs door blocking the noise from the basement. If she waited for his footsteps to stop creaking, she'd know he'd opened the upstairs door. Yet if she screamed for help, their only option would be to make her stop screaming. That was something she'd save for when she'd accepted that there was no escape and wanted a quick death. For now, she still thought she and Gertie could get out of this.

"I'm a lesbian," she told him.

"So?"

"So I bet you've never been with one, right?"

"No. I'm a dude. That's kind of the whole point of how lesbians work. You must not be very good at it if you don't know that."

"I'm just saying that this opportunity may never happen again. How am I going to stop you?"

"Even if I did want to bang a lesbian—and I do, I'll admit it—I'm not going to do it when my mom could walk into the room at any minute."

"Tell her not to come back down."

Jared's laugh was surprisingly high pitched. "I'm going to pass on trying to rape you with my parents in the house. Like Dad said, you're trying to get me to make a mistake. Not gonna happen. And you don't have to worry about me gouging out your eye. I'm not doing anything to you. Just going to wait patiently for Mom and Dad to come back."

"Pussy."

"Whatever." Jared ran his index and middle fingers across Charlene's neck and licked the blood off of them. "Mmmm," he said with a smile.

"I'm HIV positive," Charlene lied.

Jared let out a horrified gasp and began to frantically wipe at his mouth. He spat onto the floor as he backed away from her.

Gertie kicked him in the back of the head.

There was no sense of accomplishment on her face. Moving her legs had obviously caused her excruciating pain. But she'd done it.

Jared tumbled forward. The knife fell out of his hand and slid across the floor toward Charlene.

Charlene jerked her body to the right. The chair fell onto its side, smashing onto the concrete floor and landing on Jared's hand.

He shrieked.

The arm of the chair hadn't broken on impact, but it had twisted a little. A sharp tug with Charlene's right hand and the arm of the chair popped out of the back. She quickly went to work at getting her hand free. Even if the soundproofing was sufficient to cover Jared's shriek, Ken and Vivian were set to return at any moment.