A Wedding Night Gone Terribly Wrong novel Chapter 9

The boundless, suffocating darkness swallowed her whole once again.

Winifred was trapped in a deathly, absolute silence. Gus's furious words echoed in her mind. She *had* told Holden she was willing to wait for Madeleine to wake up. She *had* sworn she would accept any punishment as long as they didn't divorce.

If she judged her current reality against the promises she made—then solitary confinement was exactly the punishment she had agreed to bear.

She could endure hardship. She could be patient.

As long as Madeleine eventually recovered, she wouldn't have to lose her husband.

And so, she stopped fighting. She stopped shouting. She willingly surrendered to the pitch-black void.

When sitting up became too exhausting, she curled up on the hard floor to sleep. When her back ached from the cold ground, she forced herself to sit up again. An endless, agonizing loop.

The tiny room was infested. Rats scurried freely in the absolute dark, their tiny claws scratching across her bare feet, their furry bodies brushing against her skin. Whenever she felt them, she kicked out violently, pulling her legs tight to her chest and inching to a different corner of the room.

With zero visibility, mosquitoes feasted on her relentlessly.

Whenever she felt the painful stings, she used her medical knowledge to locate the exact acupressure points in the dark, piercing the skin with her fingernails to bleed out the toxins.

The first time a sliver of light penetrated her prison was when a small flap—no bigger than a textbook—slid open at the bottom of the door. A hand shoved a dented stainless steel bowl through the gap. The moment the bowl hit the floor, the flap snapped shut, followed by the heavy clank of a padlock.

Winifred crawled blindly across the floor. As she reached out and pulled the bowl toward her, the stench hit her like a physical blow.

*Gag.*

The overpowering smell of rancid, rotting slop seared her nostrils. It was completely inedible.

Even the guard dogs at the Lockwood estate had their own private chefs who cooked fresh meat and vegetables daily. Bringing her food that was worse than dog scraps was a clear message: they didn't want her to eat. This was just another layer of her punishment.

*Fine,* she thought. *I accept it.*

Locked in a claustrophobic box with no ventilation and no toilet, eating and producing waste would only make her living conditions infinitely worse anyway.

She wasn't terrified of starvation. Thanks to her holistic medical training, she had successfully completed a fourteen-day meditative fast in the past. Excluding the three days she had already spent in the Admonition Cell, she knew her body could survive another eleven days without food.

That was plenty of time for Madeleine to wake up.

Though she had resolved to fast, she used the daily food deliveries to track the passage of time. When the bowl was shoved through the slot for the third time, she marked it as dinner.

During those brief seconds of light, she would brutally swat one of the massive mosquitoes buzzing around her, place its crushed body in the corner, and line it up to keep count.

She assumed it was simply her body hitting its absolute biological limit after going so long without nutrients. But the rancid slop they delivered was entirely out of the question.

Desperate, her mind drifted toward the altar in the center of the room. When she was first shoved inside, she had caught a fleeting glimpse of an offering plate piled with fruit.

She dragged her emaciated body across the floor, feeling around in the pitch black until her fingers grazed the wooden table, then the ceramic plate. She grabbed an apple.

Tracing the skin, her fingertips brushed against jagged, uneven flesh—it had already been gnawed on by the rats.

She blindly rotated the apple in her hands, desperately searching for a smooth, untouched section of skin before sinking her teeth into it.

She choked down three apples in total. Once she avoided the rat-bitten sections, barely any actual fruit made it into her stomach.

Because her stomach had shrunk so drastically, even that tiny amount of food triggered a violent wave of nausea.

She assumed she just needed to rest, hoping her ruined digestive system would eventually adapt to processing food again.

Instead, the next morning, the dry heaving became terrifyingly intense.

Winifred sat paralyzed in the dark. With her lifelong medical training, a sudden, terrifying realization crashed over her.