“Yes, that’s what I want, to make my imminent death a little more convenient for everyone,” she huffed and he made another face.
“Suit yourself.”
She wanted to ask if this man was the one she feared he was, if it was Damien Orlando waiting to bust in on the other side of that curtain. She didn’t know if it would be better or worse for her if it was someone else. Perhaps someone even worse waited to stick nails under her fingernails or burn her with cigarette butts or all manner of torture that she could imagine.
She paced. It was easier that way. Andrea couldn’t exactly go for a jog in the tunnels so she paced her way around the room, despite Diego’s glares and constant huffs trying to tell her to stop. She didn’t care. If she would die, she would figure out how to do it on her own terms and with her comforts. She was a pacer. She needed constant movement. She thought better when her legs were in a steady pace and she felt better too. It was like when death row inmates requested their last meal and it was always something crazy like their mom’s homemade chicken or some other things. It was creature comforts. Things from home. She could work with this.
That was, until, Damien entered the room. He wasn’t quick nor was it like a snap of the curtain to tell them that he was here. He entered slowly, quickly, like a cat. Perhaps that was his shifter. The news outlets and YouTube videos never talked about what he was. Andrea knew dragons and wolves were most common, but there was no way this man wasn’t some sort of large, predator feline.
“Diego,” he said. “How are you?’
Even with Andrea sitting next to his chair, the man didn’t acknowledge her at all as he strode into the room and stepped in front of them. He looked only at Diego, stared at him heavily, wore the kind of smirk that wasn’t obvious. This was part of the game too, Andrea realized. Psychological warfare in the eyes. This man was good at being dangerous, and being perceived as dangerous. He excelled at it and it scared her to think that he didn’t just derive his power from making people think he was capable of scary things. She felt as though he’d be able to snap her neck in a heartbeat, without ever acknowledging that she had been there in the first place.
“I’ve been better,” he said.
“You got caught.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I should hope not.”
Now it was Damien’s turn to pace. He did it so much better than Andrea ever could. He moved like something gliding over water and looked sharply at his target: Diego. He mentally separated them, dealing with them one on one. They couldn’t stand together because, as far as Damien was concerned, they wouldn’t be guilty of the same crimes, nor would he accuse them of anything they could agree on. He was both good cop and bad cop, sympathetic jailer, and harsh judge.
“You know the rules about getting caught,” he said, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I got away.”
“Did you?”
Damien turned back. His eyes were the sharpest shade of green that Andrea had ever seen. She didn’t even know it to be a color but she’d go to the Crayola factory and invent herself if she ever got out of here. Sharp green. Damien green. Danger green.
“I’m here now.”
“And how many did you bring with you besides the girl sitting right here?”
“I’m not a cop,” Andrea said and realized her mistake of speaking almost immediately.
Those dangerous green eyes turned to her. The full effect of his face was jarring and terrifying. He was the epitome of what she imagined a super villain to look like. He was Lex Luthor in the flesh, ready to pump her full of kryptonite and drop her in the river with some rocks tied to her ankles. The organized crime circuit for shifters was intense, brutal, and controlled most of the unorganized crime at this point, depending on the city.
He didn’t say anything. He just let his gaze linger on her for a bit before turning back to Diego. He looked and then sighed, shaking his head like he was the coach of a losing baseball team trying to talk to the locker room about how they could improve, knowing that he’d said the same thing several times already. Then he bent down, brought himself to kneel and keep eye level with Diego. He put a hand on Diego’s shoulder and squeezed to the point where Diego cringed at the sensation. He squirmed under the grip but Damien held it.
“I’ve got a rally to get to downtown,” Damien said. “You’ve delayed me and now you’ve distracted me. All I will be thinking about is the danger you’ve put us all in. So, if I manage to stumble over my words, something I haven’t done since I was ten, then that’s on you and I won’t be happy.”
He released Diego and got back up. He nodded to two men standing behind them at the entrance of the room.
Suddenly, hands were on Andrea, shoving her roughly at the shoulders into the chair that she hadn’t occupied, next to Diego. Once her bottom connected with the seat, they kept their hands on her, forcing to her to stay still. She could feel the heat from them. Dragons. They had to be dragons. And they tried to intimidate her. It was working. She’d give them that much. They held her there as Damien walked to the back of the room.
“Separate them,” he said, giving instructions to the men holding them down. “I’ll talk to them separately when I get back. Put them in rooms with TVs.”
Andrea thought at first that he was doing it to be funny or to intimidate them, offer them some kind of entertainment or comfort from home, only to have it snapped away. She wouldn’t put it past the man to pull something like that. Then he was gone. The curtain let out the swooshing sound of a ruffle and they were left alone with the thugs in the room, the energy of Damien Orlando was gone.
They were allowed one moment of stillness before the men dragged them to their feet and immediately yanked back. She didn’t see Diego as they separated, though she heard him call for her. She didn’t have the mental presence to call back. She was too busy trying to keep track of where she was going, what hole they dragged her to. They took her deeper into this labyrinth and she needed to figure a way out. She could never escape, but she needed to know the path if she could. She needed to know there was a way to do it, that things weren’t completely lost to the void of darkness. Her feet dragged across the dirt floor, creating rifts behind her.
They threw her into this room. It hadn’t been like before. This one had a cot and bars attached in place of the curtain. They slammed shut behind her and she heard the click of a lock. When she turned, their sneering faces were gone from her sight but the TV clicked on. It was colder here, damper. She was farther underground, she was sure. They’d dragged her to a cell and left here there with a blank TV screen.
She’d seen Clockwork Orange, she knew this had to be a part of their game too, but she wasn’t sure how. She should avoid looking at the TV, stare at the floor or out her cell, or try to curl up into a ball on the cot. She would do whatever she could to not play their games.
Chapter 7
The TV had been turned on to a live stream of Damien’s speech. Even if she could look away, his voice would be booming throughout the cell. It was a powerful voice, one incredibly hard to ignore.
“Things like this often start with ‘my fellow Americans,’ do they not?” came the sound of Damien. “But none of us seem to be fellow Americans to each other, not while half the country is forced into hiding. There have always been the haves and the have nots, and the have nots have always managed to be louder, even with all the money and power that the haves try to throw at us.
“Our country is divided. This is true, and it sickens me and hurts me. I don’t want to see anyone hurt, not Christians or Jews, or shifters or nons. All creeds, all lives, all races, all religions are important to me and important to our cause. We understand the struggle of everyone; it’s what’s made us such capable leaders of ourselves and each other. But there is a storm on the horizon and we have a choice—run from it or head straight for the eye.”
Andrea felt her blood run just a little bit colder at that. Whatever storm was brewin
g, he would be making it, of that she was sure. Damien would reap what he would sow and it seemed like nothing would please him more than taking inventory of the amount of blood he managed to spill along the way.
“Collateral damage is regrettable and not something I ever want to accept,” he said and Andrea thought him the biggest liar in front of a podium. “But sometimes, there are sacrifices meant to be made in the world and we’re the ones to see it through. It takes a considerable amount of courage to be willing to face these challenges.”
How noble it was of him, to be willing and brave enough to sacrifice other people for his cause.
The speech went on like this. It was all inflammatory, all propaganda and buzzwords and rhetoric. She ignored most of it; it was white noise like on any news station. But his voice, the sound of it, the coldness to it, the way it seemed to be everywhere at once like a magician capable of throwing his voice every which direction, that was what stuck with Andrea. She couldn’t shake the sound or the shiver that he managed to send through her, even through a live streamed video on a slightly outdated TV. It didn’t really shock her. She’d been in his presence, she knew what he was capable of with just a look.
Eventually, the TV went silent and she’d never been more grateful in her life. But that didn’t keep the sound away. She could still feel him, as if he were talking right into her chest, reverberating there. His was a voice that would haunt her dreams. If she got out of this, she would have nightmares of him each night, and think of the darkness of this cell. He was so much smarter than she realized. And she realized quite a bit about him.
So there she was left, waiting in the dark and alone. She had no idea if he came back, how she would know when he did. She heard no sounds around her except for the constant drip from some leaky pipe somewhere down the dug-out tube. She imagined that must also be a part of some psychological warfare to try to break her. Especially since this place had a keen way of making it impossible for her to figure out how much time had passed. With the live stream turned off, she had no access to any way to measure the time via a clock. So, she was left to sit there with the sounds of her own breathing and the dripping in the distance, which she refused to start counting to try to keep track of time.
She wondered, after a while, if Diego was still alive. His face had been grim the last time they saw each other and Damien didn’t seem the type to shed too many tears over the need to kill off some comrades. But was Diego getting caught really worth all that punishment? Or was it that he brought her there with him? He’d done that to try to keep her safe, and now he very well could be paying a very, very harsh price for it. Would they torture him? Would they give him a quick death since he was one of their own? Her biggest hope was that he would go free, they’d somehow find it in their ranks to let their once brother in arms go.
But she knew that was a fallacy. This wasn’t a US military branch where there was due process and court marshalling and the most you got was a dishonorable discharge. This was a place run by people who dug out underground bunkers and robbed local stores for fire arms and explosives. These weren’t the type of people to be convinced into a democracy, no matter what anyone tried to say to them or what stories you tried to spin.
And what did that mean for her? If they were willing to completely abandon and even kill one of their own, was there anything truly stopping them from tossing her mangled and unrecognizable body into a ditch somewhere at the slightest cough or sneeze? Maybe they’d forget about her down there and she’d starve. Maybe she could tunnel her own way out, if she tried hard enough. Or maybe she was just full of hopeful wishes that would never come true because into her cell strode Damien, like smoke.
Chapter 8
He always seemed to glide, wherever it was that he went. And now he was in front of her, like an apparition appearing out of thin air. Like any ghost, he brought with him an aura of cold air and death. He looked pale, he looked dangerous, he looked like the light of the world would never shine again. She tried to imagine how he’d once been a child, someone’s son. Maybe somewhere in the world, there existed baby pictures of this man, something human and frail.
But he was a statue before her, burgeoned into existence by his own anger. He was nothing but raw energy, horrifyingly piercing eyes, and untested power. He was used to walking into a room and getting exactly what he wanted right away. So, Andrea decided that if she would die, she would make sure that she fought him as much as she could.
“You don’t scare me.” A flat-out lie.
“It’s not my intention to scare you.”
“Then what is?”
“First, to find out a little bit more about you. What’s your name, my dear?’
He sat on the chair she wasn’t using, resting his elbows on his knees like he might be a school counselor or a doctor asking if she had her flu shot yet. She ignored it. It was an act, it was a distraction. She needed to remain focused on the curve of his lips and how hard his brow seemed to stare at her.
“Andrea,” she said because she felt like not being honest would allow him to win, letting him trick her into lying, admitting that she was, in fact, too scared to tell him truths about herself.
“What do you do, Andrea?” he asked. “Have a nickname? Andi perhaps? I’ve never been one for using someone’s full name.”
“Call me whatever you want.” Was that giving him too much power? If anything, it was taking it away. She knew he would call her whatever he damn well pleased so the least she could do was grant herself the agency of pretending like she gave him permission.
“So, what do you do?”
“I want to be a lawyer.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?”
She forced herself to look at him because, if nothing else, she absolutely hated condescending men. She hated being talked to by professors and colleagues like she was inherently inferior, unintelligent. She could focus in on that, she could harness some anger that way. She could grind an axe against hyper masculinity, after all, she did it often in her undergraduate classes.
But his face was stronger. Scarier. It was a lot more real than the pictures of dudebros in a textbook. This was real danger, not just the possibility of someone saying her outfit was too revealing or that she should smile more.
“I work in the DA’s office as an aide.”
“A glorified secretary.”
“I make a difference.”
He snorted. It seemed almost too juvenile for him to do it and it made things all the more scary. He was versatile, capable of several things. He could stare into her soul, he could make her feel two inches tall, and he could snort at her like she’d said some asinine thing about the nature of his favorite sports team.
“Have you ever seen a shifter in full form?” he asked.
“No.”
“You fucked one for years and not once? Most shifters need to let off a little steam, as it were, after a round or two.”
So he talked to Diego first. He’d gotten that information from him. Had they hurt Diego to get it or was he simply that willing to give her up? She didn’t know which idea scared her more. She stared into those cold, piercing eyes.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never seen it.”
“Would you like to?”
He came so close to her. She was terrified of where he may be going with it all. She imagined him shoving her against the wall and her own tears as she screamed out for help that would never come. But he didn’t get any closer to her. He didn’t even touch her. He just stared at her from inches away and kept on smirking and smirking.
“He’s a wolf, you know,” he said. “It’s impressive, I’m sure, for people who don’t know a thing about shifter lore. But it’s far from the most powerful. Do you know what is?”
She knew better than to answer. She knew better than to give in. She was shaking now, breathing heavily through her nose, her chest rising and falling with breakneck speed.
“The dragon,” he whi
spered into her ear and then backed up.
She could feel the heat. It was as if she was in a furnace, surrounded by fire and the rippling of the air as his eyes changed in front of her. They went dark like the heart of a volcano, the very core of the earth. It was the glow of embers at the very base of the bonfire. It was hell itself. He cackled but his mouth and throat didn’t move at all. It was like he was inside her head as the heat pushed and pushed against her. It was like it wanted to break her bones and rip at her skin. It was suffocating.
“Please,” she gasped out.
He wasn’t even transformed. He stood there, giving off heat, staring into her very soul with eyes that seemed to drag right out of a wad of brimstone. She was terrified of what it would be when the full dragon stood before her. When he was there in all his might and all the terrifying glory.
“Please, don’t,” she whispered.
His smirk remained, but the heat and energy of the room died down as he took a long sigh of a breath.
“I’ve got a plan for you, Miss Andi.”
Chapter 9
She spent several days, at least she imagined it was days, in the dark after that. She received no visitors, heard from no guards or Damien. She was left to sit there and ponder her fate. She thought heavily of whether or not Diego was still alive. They’d gotten the nature of their relationship from him. No matter how they got it out of him, it had been he who gave that up, she was sure. It could have been an integration tactic, but she knew better than that.
The question was: did they torture him or did he give it up willingly to save his own skin? Could she blame him if the latter was true? After all, she had shown up at his apartment, fucked him completely emotionless, and then told him she was leaving after that. She hadn’t exactly given him a reason to believe that anything was worth salvaging in their relationship. But didn’t their feelings count for something?
Even if he had given her up to Damien, she’d still love him. She couldn’t stop that.
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