Dance for the Dead

For the next six hours Mary tried to work out a way to kill herself. The shower door had been taken out, and they had been too smart to leave the hinges. She experimented with the handcuff to see if there was a way she could get the chain across her throat to hang from the shower head, but the effort hurt her wrist terribly and there was no way to bring any pressure on her windpipe. At some point they would have to feed her, and there would be something - a glass, a knife, or even a china plate - that she could use to slash and stab herself.

But in the end she realized that she was not going to do it. If she killed herself, she would leave the hard, cold, perfect nugget of hatred inside her dead body, stranded like a virus. She had to stay alive to use it.