Page 7 of A Cage He Owns

My mouth flooded with hunger. I could almost taste her, the sugar I knew I’d find on her tongue, and it hung in the air around her thick enough to drown in. Something far older than hunger woke up behind my eyes and would not be moved. She had enough kindness in her to waste it on the men I’d broken while I sat there dripping their blood on the floor. And I knew with a cold certainty that I would take every last drop of it for myself.

I was selfish that way.

She was exactly the kind of innocent my one law was built to protect. The kind I was never meant to touch.

I was already telling that law to go fuck itself.

Because there was no version of the world where I walked out of this place and left that little bird behind.

I was quickly getting lost in my thoughts of kidnapping when a guard reached over and dragged the hood up off my head. Because naturally, you can’t clean and close a man’s face through wire mesh. But it was then that the room snapped clear.

And I found her.

The one quiet thing in the whole screaming world.

She was small.

Christ, she was small. At least beside someone like me. Scrubs a size too big, and a scatter of freckles. Her eyes came to me then, and took in the sheer size of me first, the way people always do. Then the rest of it. The blood I’d spilled and the blood I hadn’t. The hood on the floor and the eight wrecked men it had taken to haul me to her door.

After this, the fear rippled off her, and I felt it land in my own chest like a struck bell. The color drained out of her already pale face, leaving it fine and delicate as porcelain. Her pulse jumped in her throat, like a bird beating itself stupid against a window. Then her eyes found mine. A warm, startled hazel, gold shivering through them like light through whiskey. And I let her look, because I already knew I would be the last thing those eyes ever ran from.

My frightened little bird.

I didn’t even know her name.

Not that I need it, the monster growled.

We’ll have it soon enough. We’ll have all of it.

Thirty years of noise. And one small, terrified woman had reached in and switched it off without ever learning my face.

Well.

There it was.

The profound, fuck-me truth of it, sitting in the sudden quiet where my whole life used to roar.

I’d just found my new obsession.

And I had never once, in my whole ruined life, failed to take the thing I decided was mine…

And mine she would be.

3

THE MAN WITH NO NAME

ANNA

You can tell a lot about how bad a thing is going to be by how quiet it gets first.

I’d been at Ashlock four days when the infirmary went quiet in that particular way. Not the ordinary quiet of a slow afternoon I was used to.

But the other kind.

The kind where the radios stop crackling and the usual foot traffic in the corridor just… evaporates. Like the whole wing had decided at once to be somewhere else. Unfortunately, there was no such luck for me as I was currently elbow-deep in a supply drawer, counting gauze because Dr. Halloran counted nothing and someone had to. That’s when I felt it. Felt it settle over the room like a held breath.

Then, somewhere far off, came the shouting. A lot of doors slamming and many footsteps coming closer… and then the sounds of pain.