No One

Naked. Cold.

Her arms bound above her. The hook dug deep into her ass.

Alone in the dark.

She could not see her breath frost before her, but the cold grew deeper. It crept along the metal of the hook, and seemed to reach deep inside her core. Until her body shook uncontrollably...and each movement seemed to let the hook slide deeper into her tortured ass. Each frozen breath came harder. The muscles in her arm ached, but her asshole was a single point of agony on which her entire being seemed focused.

Time was measured only in breaths. Soon, Lois forgot to even measure those.

Inanna had hung in the underworld for three days before her rescue. Lois shivered. In three hours, she might have frostbite bad enough to require amputation. Her ears strained for something...anything...in the dark around her. A voice. A movement. Something to tell her that she wasn't alone, had not been forgotten. To give her hope that someone would come to rescue her.

That she would not die here.

And if no one does, Lane, Lois thought to herself in the dark. Then what? How long are we going to wait? Until that hook cuts a hole in our colon and we bleed out? Until we freeze? Until we really are nothing but a corpse hanging on a wall.

Lois clenched her fists. There was a little slack. If she swung herself back and forth...if she could touch a wall...it would be agony, and her ass might tear, but she might be able to free herself.

Then what? The reporter debated. If I do that, I'm not following the ritual, am I? And if I don't follow the ritual, then the missing women are still going to be under Blaze's power! I have to hold on...at least for a while.

As she hung there in the dark, helpless, alone, and in pain, Lois Lane thought she began to know the meaning of hell. She had heard of how badly isolation affected people, of the tricks the mind could play....those kept in a dark room for hours who thought they had been left alone for days, weeks.

I'm stronger than that, Lois thought.

Yet Blaze had other tortures for her...