CHAPTER NINE | THE CELL

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THE FEELING OF THE DAMP, COLD CONCRETE FLOOR BELOW HER WAS THE FIRST THING TO WAKE EVELYN FROM HER SLUMBER. Her eyes fluttered open and all she saw was somewhere completely unrecognizable, and fear flooded through her when she thought of Damon. She rolled over on herself and attempted to peak through a gap between the large wall that she hoped connected her cell with Damon's.

"You're up." A sigh of relief escaped Damon's lips once he heard movement in the cell beside him. "Thank God, you're okay. I thought you were—"

"No, I'm okay. I was more worried about you. You looked— Damon, you looked terrified back there in the lab." Evelyn breathed out, though her eyes continued to glance around the unfamiliar location that she appeared to be.

"Me?" He scoffed in disbelief, though Evelyn knew it was all a front. "Nope. Just curious, you know how I like to—"

"Damon, where the hell are we?" Evelyn immediately cut him off weakly as she used the bars against the cell to help her sit upright. She was severely weakened due to the mass amount of vervain Wes had been pumping into her system.

"Hasn't your boyfriend explains what we do, yet?" The familiar voice of Wes Maxfield boomed as he strolled into the dark cellar. He glanced between his two captive vampires with a chuckle. "Go on, Damon. Tell her."

A loud sigh escaped Damon's lips and Evelyn swore she could hear his heart beating faster— he was scared. "He and his freakshow friends get their kicks out of tormenting and torturing vampires all in the name of science, Eve. Eye examines, that sort of thing."

"Jesse—" Evelyn trailed off with widened eyes. "Jesse was one of your experiments?"

"Jesse was proof my research goes far beyond that. I trained him to crave vampire blood, instead of human blood." Wes mused with a proud smile. "Now, I'm ready to take my research to the next level."

Damon's eyes widened fearfully as he watched Wes pull another vervain syringe from his pocket as he started toward Evelyn's cell. "No. No, you leave her alone. Do you hear me? Wes, if you touch one hair on her head, I promise you that I will kill you."

"The threat just isn't all that threatening from inside your cell, Mr. Salvatore." Wes chuckled to himself as he kicked Evelyn's cell open and wandered inside with a darkened look on his face.

"Get the hell away from me." Evelyn shuffled backward until there was nowhere left for her to go. She was backed up against the wall and Wes used that as an opportunity to jab the syringe into her arm. "Damon—"

"Sleep now. You have a big day ahead of you, Miss Austin." The Professor chuckled as Evelyn's eyes fluttered shut once more and she dropped to the ground of her cell.

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While Evelyn was unconscious due to the vervain induced nap, Wes had managed to find Elena snooping around the Whitmore campus and thought she would be a great addition to the stock of vampires he had already acquired. He dropped her vervain body into the cell opposite, Evelyn, though Damon didn't seem to be bothered. All he cared about was his girlfriend waking up.

"Eve. Come on, baby. Evelyn, wake up, please." Damon begged through the small gap that separated himself and Evelyn. He kept his eyes fixed on her, though he occasionally glanced to Elena to check whether or not she had regained consciousness.

"Ugh." A grunt escaped Evelyn's lips softly as she heard Damon repeating her name over and over again. Her palm pressed against the damp floor below her once her eyes fluttered open to see Damon's icy blue ones staring back at her through the gap. "I'm gonna kill him."

As Evelyn gritted her teeth and vowed revenge, Damon chuckled. "Oh. I'm way ahead of you. I told him if he touched you, I'd kill him. So, he's a dead man."

"Eve? Damon?" The doppelganger called out in a panicked tone of voice as their eyes drifted over to her. She had finally woken up from the vervain and started to sit up in her cell. "What the hell is going on? Why are you here? Why am I here?"

A weakened sigh escaped Evelyn's lips as she sat upright. "Since Jesse was killed last night, Wes needed new vampire test subjects to fill the gap."

"Wes is carrying out the grand Augustine tradition: Getting his kicks out of vampire torture,"

"Did he tell you that?" Elena's eyes widened.

"He didn't have to." Damon's face instantly hardened when his glance caught Evelyn's. "I've been here before. Someone in my family sold me out to the Augustines in 1953. Every day this nut job, Dr. Whitmore, tortured us, cut into us, took pieces of our eyes out. Pushed us to every limit he could imagine, and he had quite the imagination. He kept me in this very cell. Don't think I haven't appreciated the irony."

As Evelyn listened to the story of the torture that Damon had to endure, she furrowed her brows. "How long were you here?"

"Five years, give or take," Damon answered back as he listened to the breath hitch in her throat. He knew Evelyn was worried about never getting out.

"How did you not go crazy?" The doppelganger scoffed in disbelief.

"Believe it or not, I made a friend," Damon explained. "His name was Enzo. He was a soldier in Europe during World War Two. Dr. Whitmore was working in a battlefield hospital when he discovered Enzo was a vampire. So he drugged him, locked him in a coffin, and shipped him overseas. He'd been here ten years by the time I'd joined the party."

"Guys," Elena called out to the group once more, which interrupted the conversation. "Wes knew my dad. They worked together. He said that my dad was an Augustine, too. I know that my dad was a vampire hunter, but he was also the town doctor. He was kind and gentle and loving. He wouldn't be part of a place that would cut your eyes out."

A sigh left Damon's lips as he rested his head against the concrete wall. His hand reached through the small gap for Evelyn's, and the pair sat quietly, holding onto each other. "People are full of surprises."

Evelyn's eyes darted to Elena when she saw the doppelganger slump down and a few cries left her lips. "Hey, Elena. We're getting out of here. I mean, Stefan's gonna notice when none of us come home, right?" Evelyn sighed when she heard Damon's silence. "Right, Damon?"

"Points for optimism, but unfortunately Stefan doesn't even know this place exists."

The Austin vampire furrowed her brows, then clutched Damon's hand tighter. "But you were here for five years."

"Yeah, and the first year I thought he'd rescue me. He didn't. Once I escaped, there was no point in giving him more to feel guilty about, so I never told him what happened here. I never told anyone." The Salvatore shrugged immediately.

"Okay. Well, you just said it yourself; you escaped." Evelyn concluded as she saw a hopeful look in Elena's eyes. "How did you do it?"

"They let us out of the basement once a year. Every New Year's Eve, the Augustine people had a little cocktail party with a vampire buffet on the side. We were weak from vervain injections, half-starved from living on a glass of blood a day, chained up like animals. This little annual shindig is where Dr. Whitmore got to show all of his Augustine friends what he'd found in his research. He let his guests drink from us to demonstrate the healing power of vampire blood. But, on the plus side, that's how Enzo came up with his plan."

"What was it?" The doppelganger asked in the hopes it would coax Damon into revealing his secret.

"He worked out that if one of us gave up their ration every day for a year, we'd be able to fight when the next New Year's Eve party came around. The plan worked, more or less." Damon shrugged and then stopped talking.

"No, don't do this. Don't shut off. Come on, baby, we need to know how to get out of here." Evelyn tried her best to encourage Damon to explain what he went through, but it was obvious he wanted to shut it out. "Elena and I aren't going to judge you, far from it— in my opinion, these freaks deserve to die."

A heavy sigh escaped Damon's lips, then he gripped onto Evelyn's hand for comfort once more. "The Augustine's next party was in 1958. I'd been drinking Enzo's rations for an entire year. I mean, he kept a few drops here and there so he wouldn't desiccate and as he starved himself, I got stronger from all the extra blood. Just like he said I would. Enzo trusted me with his life. There was a fire, it was getting out of control. I would've burned or they would've captured me again and there was no way I would've ever gotten another chance to escape. So, I chose to save myself. I knew if I was gonna save myself I had to stop caring about Enzo, so I turned off my emotions. And, I left my friend to die. After that everything was fine. Everything was fine."

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After a while of adjusting to Damon's admission that he left his only friend to die in the Whitmore fire. Aaron Whitmore, Elena's college friend, and Wes' nephew wandered into the cellar. He had a gun gripped tightly in his hand as he glanced around to see the three in cells. "What the hell is this place?"

"Aaron?" A glimmer of hope echoed in Elena's as got up to her feet the moment she saw the Whitmore boy.

"Great." Damon rolled his eyes out of irritation. "Mini-Wes."

"I had no idea what Wes was doing. I didn't even know there was a basement down here." Aaron's voice was unsettled and shaky as he glanced between the three vampires. Then, he turned back to Elena.

"Aaron, you have to help us."

"I wanna know the truth. When you met me at Megan's memorial, you asked me a bunch of questions."

A small scoff left Evelyn's lips as she watched a dozen bullets fall from the pistol that Aaron was attempting to reload. "Uh— do you want some help with that. You look like you could use it."

"Yeah, well I've never used a gun before!" The Whitmore boy viciously shouted in Evelyn's direction, before he turned his sights back on the Gilbert girl. "And I've never killed anyone either, unlike you."

"What're you talking about?" Elena furrowed her brows as she held tightly onto the bars of her cell.

Aaron lifted the pistol up into the air and aimed it right for Elena. "Wes said a vampire killed Megan."

"And you thought it was Elena?" A scoff of complete and utter disbelief left Damon's lips. He thought it was truly comical that Aaron thought Elena had killed Megan.

"Aaron, no offense to Elena, but she's got too much of a martyr complex to even kill anyone." A chuckle left Evelyn's lips. She found it amusing, though she wanted to assist in the trial of Elena Gilbert. "Trust me. Elena didn't kill your fri—"

"Shut up!" Aaron screamed out and then turned his gun on Evelyn, as Damon's eyes widened. "Wes also said that a vampire killed my parents. Maybe that was you, too. Why else would you be so interested in me? Why else would you pretend to be my friend?" He turned back to Evelyn and Damon. "She's a vampire!"

"Not the one that killed your parents." The Salvatore's voice was calm. He took a deep breath and then rolled his eyes. "That was all me."

Aaron lowered his gun from Evelyn and then turned around to Damon. "What did you just say?" The Whitmore boy headed straight over to Damon's cell and aimed the pistol right at it. "Start talking."

"He's lying. Aaron." Evelyn desperately pleaded. She figured that Damon was owning up to the death of Aaron's parents to save Elena. She wasn't convinced he had anything to do with it. "It wasn't any of us, okay. You just have to let us go and we'll fix—"

"In 1958, after the fire, Enzo was dead. So I had to take on my revenge plan solo. Kill every member of the Whitmore family, all but one. Then, I'd let that one grow up, start a family then I'd take out that generation. And every generation after that."

Aaron's blood ran cold as he stared at Damon. "How many Whitmore's have you killed?"

"Since 1958? I lost count." Damon immediately scoffed and turned his eyes to Evelyn, who looked back at him in disbelief. "I told you it wasn't pretty."

Aaron completely lost it at the fact that Damon couldn't care less about his actions, or what he had done. He pulled the trigger and shot a bullet straight at Damon's head. Evelyn felt her heart thump in her chest as she heard The Salvatore's body drop down to the floor beside her. "Damon!"

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