Bridled Hollow
Copyright© 2025 by BareLin
Chapter 5
The strobing red and blue lights didn’t just paint the alley walls, the dumpster, the horrified faces of the man and woman; they possessed them. Each frantic pulse bleached the world into stark, terrifying contrasts, erasing nuance and leaving only the garish palette of disaster. The sirens weren’t salvation; they were the closing jaws of a trap I’d just barely escaped.
Police. The word echoed in the hollow cavity of my chest. Ice flooded my veins, colder than the unforgiving brick grinding into my spine. Johnna’s weary sigh ghosted in my ear, the transaction outside the van—cash for a deleted life. The ditch was full of bones. How deep did the rot go? Were the uniforms stepping out of those cruisers, servants of the Hollow, ready to drag me back to the charnel pit and the grinding gears of Gamma, or were they prepared to deliver me straight into another kind of sterile hell where disbelief became my final, unbreakable shackle?
Above, the dim light masked the markings on the patrol vehicles, turning them into anonymous predators. I expected nothing less than extermination, a return to the sea of bones they intended for me. The thought offered a grim comfort: at least the bones were silent, at least the mud didn’t lie.
Tires crunched gravel like teeth grinding bone. Car doors slammed—heavy, final, authoritative. Boots struck the pavement, quick and purposeful, converging on the alley mouth. A spear of brilliant white light cut through the swirling mist and the lurid light show, sweeping past the dumpster and pinning me against the wall like some grotesque insect specimen.
“Police! Stay where you are! Let’s see your hands!” The voice, amplified and distorted by a bullhorn, shattered the fragile quiet after the sirens died. It held no warmth, only the cold steel of command.
I flinched, pressing harder into the unyielding brick, seeking vanishing shelter. My hands were already empty, hanging uselessly at my sides, trembling with a violence that felt seismic. Showing them felt like surrender, like baring my throat to the blade.
“Miss,” the woman from the store whispered urgently, her voice cracking like dry earth, “do what they say. It’s okay. They’re here to help.” Her kindness felt like another snare, laced with the poison of false hope.
The flashlight beam held me mercilessly. It illuminated every detail the Quik Mart’s fluorescence had already exposed: the mud and dried blood caking my legs like a second skin, the deep, angry scratches from thorns and wire crisscrossing my arms and scalp, the ragged tear in the thin smock revealing vulnerable flesh, the shocking ruin of my bare feet against the filthy asphalt. I was a tableau of violation, a living crime scene laid bare.
“Approaching with caution,” a different voice stated flatly, closer now. Two figures materialized at the alley entrance, silhouetted against the pulsing lights, hands resting on holstered weapons. Their posture was rigid, coiled. One kept the blinding light fixed on me, while the other scanned the alley’s fetid depths. I saw their eyes, visible now beneath the brims of their caps—not the dead, empty pits of Handlers, but sharp, assessing, and filled with a professional shock they quickly masked behind practiced neutrality.
“Can you understand me, miss?” the first officer asked, his voice dropping the bullhorn distortion but losing none of its authority. He took a slow, deliberate step forward, then another. “We’re not going to hurt you. We need you to stay very still. Paramedics are on the way.”
Paramedics. The word detonated in my mind, radiating dread. It meant touch. Exposure. Being handled, probed, and documented. My skin, raw from leather and metal, recoiled at the dual onslaught of potential relief and fresh horror. The ingrained terror of contact—the bite of the prod, the cruel cinch of the harness buckle, the impersonal, bruising grip of Handlers—warred savagely with the screaming agony radiating from my feet and the chill leaching into my marrow. Could these hands be different, or was this just a gentler form of capture, a velvet-lined trap?
The second officer spoke softly into his shoulder radio, his words clinical daggers: “Female, late teens, severe visible trauma to lower extremities, multiple lacerations, signs of prolonged exposure ... requesting expedited medical.”
The first officer stopped a few feet away, angling the light slightly off my face but still illuminating my battered form in its harsh glare. “My name is Officer Reyes. This is Officer Dalton. We’re here to help you. Can you tell us your name?”
Lyra Vale. The name screamed silently in the vault where I’d buried her. Lyra Vale. Yet giving it felt like handing them a weapon forged in the Hollow’s fires. Names had power there; they were things to be stripped away—erased. Bria was dead on the fence line. Who was I now? A ragged breath hitched in my throat, catching on shards of glass. No sound emerged. My jaw felt rusted shut, welded by terror.
The flashing lights painted Officer Reyes’s face in alternating red and blue, rendering his expression a shifting mask—concern one moment, stern assessment the next. The idling car from the pumps remained a dark, watchful silhouette. The witnesses stood frozen near the Quik Mart door, their faces pale smudges in the chaotic light.
A new siren, higher-pitched and insistent, sliced through the fading echo of the first. An ambulance pulled up, flooding the scene in a harsh, surgical white light. Doors burst open, and figures in dark uniforms moved with unnerving briskness, hauling ominous equipment.
The world dissolved into a nauseating blur of violation and surreal relief. Hands sheathed in blue nitrile gloves reached for me. Gentle? Professional? Perhaps. Yet hands they were nonetheless. I recoiled violently, a choked, animal sound tearing from my raw throat, every muscle locked rigid.
The paramedic—Sarah, her badge said, with eyes that held a terrifying calm—paused. “Easy now. Easy. We’re just here to help. Let me look at your feet first, okay? They’re badly hurt.” Her voice was low, soothing, utterly alien in its lack of malice or calculation.
Her partner unfolded a stiff yellow tarp onto the filthy ground. “We need to get you off this cold pavement, sweetheart. Can you sit down for us? Just here.”
Sweetheart. The misplaced endearment scraped like sandpaper over raw nerves. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Officer Dalton shifted his weight almost imperceptibly, a silent, potent reminder of the authority backing this suffocating “help.” Trapped. Again. Always.
Sarah knelt slowly, deliberately, keeping her hands visible the way one might approach a feral, wounded thing. “I need to see how bad these cuts are. There might be glass or debris. Can I touch your ankle? Just to look.”
The touch, when it came, was feather-light on my mud-caked, bloodied ankle. Not the harness—that was discarded with the boots—but Sarah’s gloved hands began the meticulous, horrifying process of removing the ingrained filth, the ditch slime, the dried blood that clung like a second, shameful skin. A warm saline solution washed over my calf, stinging the lacerations with acid fire yet loosening the crusted grime. It was a cleansing, but it felt like a profound new violation, stripping away the last physical barrier between me and their prying eyes, between the ghost of Bria and the terrifying, uncertain world reclaiming Lyra Vale. Each swipe of the gauze peeled back a layer of the Hollow’s claim.
The Interrogation Begins Before the Ambulance Doors Close
As Sarah worked, focused on the ruin of my feet, the world narrowed to a tunnel of pain, cold shock, and overwhelming exposure. They lifted me onto the stretcher, the rough blanket an agonizing rasp against my flayed skin. The short journey to the ambulance was a jostling, disorienting nightmare of flashing lights and muffled, indecipherable voices. Inside, the sterile smell of antiseptic and plastic was overwhelming—a chemical assault.
Sarah and her partner were securing the gurney straps when the ambulance doors swung wider. A man in a rumpled suit filled the opening, blocking the chaotic light outside. His face, under the harsh interior lights, was caught in a grimace balanced between pity and hard, professional detachment. His eyes scanned me, inventorying the visible harness marks even through the thin blanket, the raw scalp, and the hollow, haunted vacancy in my eyes that mirrored the ditch skulls.
“Miss—your name?”
“Lyra Vale. Lyra Vale,” I said, forcing the words out.
His reply came steady, professional, slicing through the ambulance’s low rumble and Sarah’s soft instructions.
“I’m Detective Holloway. We need to know what we’re walking into. Where were you kept, and how many girls are still there?”
Girls. The word struck me like a physical blow, piercing the fog of pain and terror. Not fillies. Girls. Like Nelda. Like the pale, wide-eyed ghosts stumbling from the van. My throat was shredded sandpaper, ruined by disuse and silent screams. I swallowed and forced the words out. They scraped like gravel dragged over stone. “Hundreds. At Bridled Hollow.”
Holloway’s gaze didn’t waver. “Armed guards?”
“Handlers. Prods. Whips. Not guns.” The distinction was vital, a lifeline to the specific horror. Guns meant a swift, impersonal death squad. Prods meant the intimate, electric agony of control, the familiar sting of the lash.
“Location—the exact layout.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. The images burned behind my eyelids: the paddock’s mocking mirrors reflecting broken spirits, the numbered stalls like concrete coffins, the unlatched loading gate I hadn’t dared use, the sagging fence in the West Orchard where I’d torn through wire and thorns, the service track rutted with the tracks of despair, the van idling like a waiting predator, the heavy cart Nelda had sacrificed herself to topple. The kennels where the dogs bayed for blood. The predictable, brutal complacency of Silas and Petra, Reed and Helga. The ditch. The bones.
“I can draw it,” I rasped, the effort leaving me trembling violently.
Holloway nodded sharply to Sarah, who hesitated only a fraction of a second before handing me a cheap plastic pen and a clipboard holding a blank incident report. My hands shook violently, the pen a clumsy, alien weapon. Yet the map was seared into my mind, a blueprint of hell itself.
With trembling, jagged strokes, I sketched the geography of torment: the imposing, false-fronted main house, the long, low Training Barn radiating dread, the service track snaking like a viper around back, and the heavy, reinforced Loading Gate. I marked the West Orchard, the V-shaped sag in the fence—my escape route—the reeking compost pits, and the dense, clawing bramble thicket. I indicated the kennels, the handler barracks radiating casual cruelty, and the cold intake barn. With unsteady lines, I outlined the guard rotations we’d observed, the patterns of negligent arrogance.
The detective leaned in, his shadow falling over the crude map as I drew. His expression darkened, a storm cloud gathering as he took in the details. “Christ.” The single word carried a universe of dawning, sickening horror.
The ambulance engine roared to life, sirens wailing anew as we pulled away from the alley, carrying my body away from the Hollow while my mind was viciously dragged back into its suffocating depths. Sarah worked around Holloway—checking my thready pulse, cleaning a deep gash on my arm with antiseptic that burned like molten lead, murmuring reassurances that dissolved before they reached me. The detective kept talking, his voice urgent, demanding, cutting through the siren’s scream.
“Who runs it?”
“I don’t know names. Just—Madams. Handlers. There’s a manager. Someone higher.” Vanya’s flint eyes, cold and calculating. Sorrell’s storm-grey gaze, promising storms. The granite Statue, implacable. The man in the suit on the cart. Faceless power, cloaked in expensive clothes.
“Clients?”
A cold wave, deeper and blacker than the ditch water, washed over me. The image was razor-sharp: the ornate cart piled with hay like a grotesque parody of leisure, the man lounging atop it, sipping amber liquid from a crystal glass, a coiled bullwhip resting casually across his lap like a pet snake. Utterly at ease, while harnessed girls strained like beasts of burden mere feet away. “Yes.”
Holloway’s jaw tightened, a muscle leaping. He exchanged a grim, loaded glance with another figure who had slipped into the back of the ambulance just before the doors closed—a woman in a dark FBI windbreaker, her eyes sharp as obsidian shards, her posture radiating coiled, lethal intensity.
The agent leaned in, her voice tighter and colder than Holloway’s. “Lyra, units are converging on Bridled Hollow now. We need you to tell us everything. Who else is still in immediate danger?”
Nelda. Her gray-green eyes met mine in the gloom, the scarf pressed into my hand, the deliberate, sacrificial fall. Marta. Her instinctive flinch at the mere crack of a crop in the distance. Kael. His startled yelp as Nelda collided with him. The new girls, pale and wide-eyed as lambs to slaughter, stumbled into the intake barn. The ones who never made it to the cart vanished into the Breeding barn or the unmarked shipping containers. The ones whose bones filled the ditch—nameless and countless.
“Everyone,” I whispered, the word barely audible over the siren, yet carrying the crushing weight of the grave. “Everyone left inside.”
The hospital’s fluorescent lights buzzed like a swarm of trapped wasps, a sound that merged sickeningly with the rhythmic beeping of the monitor beside my bed and the low, indistinct murmur of the hallway outside. They’d tried to cover me with a thin, scratchy blanket—the nurse with her gentle hands, the detective (Holloway, a looming, watchful presence near the door) with his carefully averted gaze. Yet the fabric felt like sandpaper on skin that hadn’t known freedom or gentle touch in months. Every nerve ending screamed, hypersensitive and raw, flayed open.
They’d cut away the torn, stinking smock. Under the harsh, pitiless glare of the antiseptic lights, the full, obscene extent of Bridled Hollow’s ownership was laid bare for the world to see.