“She speaks,” he said with a smile that felt sour. “Yes well, we owned that block of abandoned building you’re referring to. Did you forget that just because no one actively lives there, it doesn’t mean someone doesn’t own it?”
“You attacked and kidnapped us,” she said.
“We did. Am I meant to feel guilty for that?”
“That’s false imprisonment.”
“Unless we were within our rights since you were, as I mentioned, trespassing.”
“Just ask us what you want and let us go.”
“I did ask, your names?”
Something about giving someone her name seemed to make an entire situation feel a lot more vulnerable. When someone had her name, they had power over her. It was that way in stories and fairy tales. She couldn’t give him her name because then he would use it, turn it into something weak or something it wasn’t. He would use it to try to break her. So, she kept her mouth shut in a tight line.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, there are a few ways we could do this.”
He stood with a sigh, went to the corner of the room, and pulled out a box that had been hiding in the darkness. He came back with a small file in his hand, metal and black. He walked over to Erik who seemed to barely register where he was, his head lulled to one side. James knelt down in front of him and tapped on his cheek with force, but not enough to be considered a slap.
“Hey there, pal,” he said. “I can see you’re not really in a state to talk, which is fine with me. But your friend here is and she’s refusing. So, I’m going to have to get her to talk somehow. Since you’re pretty helpless right now, you, unfortunately, drew the short straw here.”
He pulled Erik’s hand out and lined the file up with his index finger, where the nail met the skin. Alessia realized what he was planning to do just seconds too late. Erik let out a yell that seemed to wake him from his daze, just a bit. Blood immediately flowed from where the file was buried, dripping down to the floor so much louder than Alessia would have thought possible.
“No!” she yelled. “Please. Okay. My name is Alessia.”
“Last name?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Monroe. Alessia Monroe.”
“There, wasn’t so hard, right? Six syllables, maybe five seconds out of your life,” he said, pulling the torture device back. Erik yelped even then and immediately cradled his wounded hand against his chest. “And his name?”
“Erik. Roberts,” she said.
“Excellent.”
He stepped away and wiped the bloodied instrument on his pants. He tossed it back into the box and she wondered how many other people had been victims of it and what the chances were that Erik would get some sort of infection as a result. That was an issue for later.
“You have given me a lot to think about,” he said. “So, we’ll call it a day.”
“Really?” Alessia said.
“You want to go some more?”
No. She didn’t. But she’d been dragged from her cell. Drake had been tasered to the ground. Erik had very nearly been tortured. Just so they could learn their names. She wouldn’t complain about being let go for the night, but she was more than a little worried about what it all meant.
“I didn’t think so,” he said, reading her emotions on her face. “We’ll let you get cozy back in your cells and try this all again tomorrow.”
As if on cue, Lana appeared and had her hands on Alessia, yanking her up. Someone else grabbed Erik and dragged him out the door. Alessia looked after him, wanting to call out, to let him know she was there, she wasn’t far, she was thinking of him, she’d figure this out. But nothing came out as her mouth hung open and watched after him being dragged away.
“Maybe we should room you with him and get a new bet going, huh?” Lana said a little too intimately in her ear. “Does a guy being wounded really do it for you?”
“Fuck off.”
“So she does have teeth,” Lana chuckled next to her. “They’re pretty dull, but what else do you expect from a non? It’s a start. Maybe we’ll make something dangerous out of you yet, huh?”
Alessia kept her mouth shut but glared in front of her. She wanted to avoid the way Lana shoved her down the hall but she didn’t know the way back. Besides, she’d probably find herself on the ground, just the same as Drake if she tried that. So she settled for glaring and keeping her body stiff as she walked through the halls and took the turns she was directed to take.
“Home sweet home,” Lana said when they returned to the room with the cell.
The door opened with an ear-bursting groan at the hinge and Alessia was tossed inside once more. Drake had managed to pick himself up, now sitting against the wall. He still seemed to be in a fair bit of pain, but his eyes opened at the sound and found Alessia. He shifted towards her, his face instantly full of concern.
“I’m okay,” she promised in a whisper.
“Cute,” Lana said. “I’ll be back later to check on you two. Have fun.”
“Where’d they take you?” he asked. “Did they do anything? You’re not hurt?”
Alessia shook her head. “They just asked me and Erik our names. They’ve beat him up badly though. He needs help.”
Drake looked grim, nodding and sighing as he turned to look off into the air, in thought.
“Are you okay?” Alessia asked, letting her fingers travel across his skin along the jaw and into his hairline. He leaned into the touch.
“Better now,” he said. “Is that too cliché?”
She snorted. “For anywhere outside a jail cell, absolutely.”
“Try not to hold it over me then when we get free.”
The when in his sentence seemed so out of place. It was hard for Alessia to convince herself there was a future where she would see daylight again, go to the movies, or out to eat. She’d only been down here for a few days and already she felt like she’d been a prisoner for years. Jail cells and cabin fever had that interesting effect on the psyche.
“We will get out,” Drake said, reading her thoughts and squeezing her hands into his own. “That I promise you.”
And despite everything she’d been through and all the circumstances surrounding them, she believed him. More fool me, she thought.
Chapter 3
Another round of feeding came before anyone returned for her and Drake, very quietly, tried to relay to her what he knew.
“There’s good news and bad news about this situation,” he said.
“That sounds absolutely not encouraging at all, but lay it on me,” Alessia said, biting into a surprisingly crisp apple. They cared about their health enough to vary their diet options.
“The good news is, we’re not in an organization headed by Orlando,” he said. “The bad news is, that’s all I know. Could be worse, could be just as bad. But at least we’re not in his hands. You’d be dead already.”
Alessia shuddered as she nibbled at what remained of the flesh of the apple around the core. Was any of that good news? She wasn’t the prisoner of one madman but she might be the prisoner of another. It wasn’t exactly encouraging, or, if it was, it was immediately canceled out by everything they didn’t know about their current situation. And that was the real danger in all of this.
“I know it’s not much,” he said, shrugging. “But trust me, it’s better.”
“The only person we don’t know is alive is Diego,” Alessia said.
“Is there a reason he wouldn’t be if Erik is alive?”
“You tell me.”
He sighed and leaned back, thinking. These were politics that Alessia hadn’t been prepared to face. Fighting for the social justice of the group was one thing. But this was internal fights, internal issues. She was an outsider trapped in something she knew was much bigger than her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how known he was outside of Orlando’s group. He might have put a bounty on him. But just as many shifters would be willing to recruit him to piss Orlando off as
they would be to hand him over. That man inspires as much hatred as he inspires fear.”
Alessia nodded. She desperately wished she had access to some kind of library or some way of seeking out this information. But she was helpless, locked in a cell, being fed on a schedule like an animal.
They came back for her that night but, this time, left her in the cage.
“We’re here to talk to you both,” James said. “No sense in dragging anyone anywhere. Besides, I want you where you will be most comfortable, nice and cozy at home. Pretend it’s a house call.”
“Fuck you,” Drake spat.
“Drake, I know how much you’re constantly jonesing for some punishment but right now, I want information out of you,” he said with a much less playful demeanor. “We have the same enemy. And I just have to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
Drake continued to glare and Alessia felt the heat in the room rise. He was getting agitated. And when he got agitated, things got very, very dangerous. She’d felt the heat before. If this James guy was a dragon too, she might be boiled alive by their death glares to each other and their perpetual dick-measuring contest.
She placed a hand on Drake’s arm. His skin was so warm she very nearly dragged her hand away. But she held it there. He didn’t get any less tense, but a flicker in his eyes told her he knew she was next to him. The movement and the motion of it all wasn’t lost on their capture either. Alessia watched his eyes bounce between her hand and then the pair of them. His smirk was gone, however. Whatever playfulness had been there before was now gone.
“How did you meet our good professor here?” James asked. He didn’t address Alessia by name and she turned to glare to him. She wouldn’t be ordered around like an animal or pet. “Come on, my good friend Alessia Monroe. Tell me all about it.”
“I’m a graduate student at the school,” she said.
“There’s more to it than that, let’s hear it all.” She was half-tempted to tell him fuck you as well. But he seemed to sense that as well as he sat back and crossed his arms. “I’d be glad to bring your friend back in here for another manicure.”
She swallowed. She was fairly certain he was bluffing but he raised an eyebrow and she decided her pride wasn’t worth it. “I’m the teaching fellow for his class. He teaches undergrads.”
“You’re a non,” he said and it wasn’t a question. Nor was it untrue. She shrugged. “And you’re helping to teach classes about shifter culture?”
“It’s my area of study.”
“Isn’t that a little invasive of you?”
“I want to help.”
“By breaking into our safe houses?”
“We had no idea where we were. We were looking for Drake after you kidnapped him right from my apartment. Diego was showing us a place we might find him.”
“Ah, good old Diego.”
The playfulness was back but it felt dangerous. It felt wrong. There was a story with Diego. Alessia thought about what Drake had told her about his girlfriend, how they’d so brutally hurt her. She swallowed. “What did you do to him?”
“He’s around, just like you,” he said.
“I know what you did to him, to his girlfriend,” she said and felt Drake tense next to her. He’d been the one to spill the beans on that, she couldn’t blame him.
“We didn’t do anything. Damien Orlando is a nutcase,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we like Diego. He’s pretty useless to us.”
“Why?”
“Is this your interrogation or mine?” James laughed. “Diego is a wild dog. He’s got no place here.”
“Wild dog?” she asked with a furrowed brow.
Drake put a hand on her shoulder and whispered into her ear. “A wolf.”
It took a moment for everything to click properly in Alessia’s head. He was a wolf shifter and they were surrounded by dragons. So that was it then. Even the oppressed could oppress each other. She knew that wolf shifters were a bit rarer than dragons and, for some reason, that wasn’t admired. Trish never wanted to go to shifter events because she’d been afraid it would be full of dragons.
“You’re keeping him locked up because he’s a wolf?” Alessia asked, incredulously. “Shouldn’t you be banding together?”
“You don’t know the half of what goes on here, girl,” he said. “It’s not some sunshine and rainbows version of a resistance like they like to paint for you in movies. We have to cut off weak limbs and Diego is one of the weakest of the weak, especially now that he’s had his tail between his legs since that bullshit over the summer.”
Alessia had known Diego for a few hours and hadn’t been entirely sure that he wasn’t walking them into a trap. But now she felt the need to defend him.
“I don’t know about you, Lana,” James said. “But this conversation is boring me. I was hoping you were at least some kind of spy. You’re just a bumbling kid with some very misguided and naive notions about the world.”
She opened her mouth to protest but Drake’s hand on her shoulder held her still and the protests died in her throat and open mouth.
“I’ll decide what to do with you tomorrow.” He stood, sighing as if he’d just risen from a long day of working. He yawned and seemed to be contemplating something. “Let’s mix things up, shall we? Alessia, you come with me.”
He snapped his fingers and Lana moved to open the cell, Drake immediately went on the defensive. “Where are you taking her?” he asked as he stepped in front of her and Lana lazily rolled her eyes at the show of protection.
“I don’t get much entertainment here and you lot are like a reality TV show,” was all James said before he left, snapping at Lana to follow after him.
Alessia calmly stepped around Drake. She wouldn’t watch him get hurt again trying to protect her. Besides, she could hold her own here. Something told her these people had no intention of hurting her. They would have done it already, they had plenty of chances. So she brushed his arm and hazard to place a kiss on his cheek. She didn’t want to be overly affectionate, but they already knew and she wanted him to be comforted by it.
“I’ll be okay,” she whispered and then she walked over to Lana, jerking away when the woman tried to forcibly take her by the arm. “I can walk myself.”
Lana shrugged and obeyed. It was a start. The pendulum would swing in her favor soon, she was sure of it.
Chapter 4
The new cell was a solo one and she was left with Lana as her guard most of the time, so she wasn’t really alone. She was anxious being separated from Drake and wondering in what corner of this underground labyrinth Erik bled in. But these people seemed to be huffing and puffing without blowing any of the houses down. They would have killed them already if they wanted to. So why were they still here?
In the meantime, Lana was certainly one for conversation and it grated on Alessia’s patience. “See, my thing, is it like a bucket list thing for you people?” she asked. “You know how those sleazy girls in college always have a list of black guys or Middle Eastern guys or Jewish guys and all the other ethnicities they want to bang before they’re done? Is that what it was about?”
Alessia didn’t answer and ignored her flaming cheeks.
“I bet you have some kind of fixation, right? Or a kink? You study this shit so maybe it’s some kind of Freudian thing—”
“Do you ever shut up?” Alessia snapped, finally.
“Thank God, I thought you’d never speak,” she sighed dramatically. “I was afraid I would be talking to myself forever.”
“So why not just shut up and give us both some peace?”
“Because I go just as crazy as you being cooped up down here in the dark, alone.”
“So why not just leave for a while?”
“Would that I could.”
It was a slip on Lana’s part and the first sign to Alessia that something was off in the dynamic of this place. She did her best to categorize these people. James was the leader. Lana was a sarcastic lackey. She hadn�
�t seen anyone else except for a few stray people here and there, and she quickly suspected the people she saw were, in fact, the only people in this base. Maybe that’s why they kept them all so isolated, to hide the fact that there were less hulking henchmen to threaten them than they wanted Alessia and the others to think.
“So you’re not going to starve me, you’re not going to kill me, you’ve got all the information out of me that you can,” Alessia listed out. “What else do you people want? To make me your sex slave?”
“Oh please, just because you have the professor and the pretty boy drooling over you doesn’t mean you’re some amazing prize, lady,” Lana said.
“So why am I here?”
“I guess you’ll just find out, won’t you?”
“You don’t know either.”
It wasn’t a question but a very bold guess. Lana had no idea. She was as much in the dark as they were, maybe even just as interested. Alessia wished she’d actually paid attention on the days Trish forced her to watch episodes of Big Brother. She’d have to try to work this on the fly, imagine she was a contestant in a reality TV show, gunning for a million dollars (her freedom would feel like that when all was said and done).
“You keep talking and you’ll end up looking like your friend and his one good eye,” Lana said so lazily that it wasn’t even good enough to be called a bluff.
Alessia had to think. How do people in movies get out of these situations? They seduce the guards? Well, she already ruled that one out with Lana’s lovely quip about her average appearance. She had nothing to offer her, she had no money and no power. She was a graduate student saddled with piles of loans. She was certainly not in any position of power with herself behind bars.
The only option was to—God forbid—get to know Lana.
“So, how long have you been working here?” she asked and very nearly cringed herself at the sound of it.
“Really? We’re going this?”
“I’m bored. I’ll go first,” Alessia said, not wanting to stop the flow of conversation. She spoke without a filter now. “I’m a first-year PhD candidate at USC in Shifter Studies and Culture. I was Dr. Tekkin’s teaching fellow and apprentice, which is how I ended up here—”
The Artistry of Love Page 48
