by Wilde, Kati
“Pull up last night’s video,” Victor tells Charlie, the guard seated in front of the monitors, then looks to me. “Was Lissa in her stall at lights out?”
Trying not to be too obvious, I drag my gaze away from the temptation of those buttons. “She was.”
“Start at twenty-two hundred hours,” he instructs Charlie. “What time did Bravo enter your stall?”
“Around midnight,” I tell him, watching the monitors as Charlie fast-forwards through the footage. The video isn’t just of the interior of the barn. One camera outside covers the entrance, and another has a wide-angle view of the empty desert behind the barn. Nothing covers either side of the barn—also good to know—though they might have more cameras around the property. A farmhouse serves as a base for the guards and the whole compound. No doubt they have more security monitors there.
“There!” Victor barks. “Slow it down again.”
The playback resumes normal speed. To my surprise, it’s not at the moment Lissa emerges from her stall. Instead Victor focused on two guards standing in the aisle—Bravo and Hotel, who must have been on duty manning the control booth last night. No sound comes through the video, but it’s easy to read their interaction via their gestures.
Or maybe it’s easy to read because I already know how all of this happens. Lissa’s told me. Bravo offers to keep an eye on the control booth if Hotel wants to go outside for a cigarette. Hotel always does. And there he is, giving Bravo a grateful fistbump before exiting the barn.
Hotel appears on the exterior camera, leaning back against the yellow vinyl siding next to the door, his lighter flaring through the dark. Bravo disappears into the control booth, but only for a moment. Even as Lissa’s stall door inches open, Bravo races out of the booth and across the aisle, his hands yanking at his buckle. By the time Lissa arrives at the guards’ break room, he’ll have his pants down around his ankles and his dick ready to go, because Lissa has to return to her stall before Hotel finishes his cigarette. So Bravo always gets a head start with his hand.
“Goddammit,” Victor mutters, and Charlie adds something like “That stupid fucker.”
And there she is. I catch my breath as Lissa slips out of her stall, my fingers tightening around the edges of the tray. The monitors capture her from six different angles: a slender, painfully beautiful woman with long, flame-red hair, sneaking her way past the fighters’ stalls, crouching as she passes their doors so the wooden panels along the bottom conceal her progress. Even without any sound available, I know she’s moving silently—afraid that if one of the fighters discovers her deal with Bravo, he’ll expose the arrangement to the other guards or force her to trade sexual favors for silence.
Anxiety grips my throat and I silently urge her on, as if I’m watching her escape in real time, instead of witnessing something that happened six hours ago. Outside the barn, Hotel exhales a cloud of smoke. My gaze flickers to that monitor before returning to Lissa, my heart thundering.
Hotel’s the problem. If not for him, Lissa would have bitten off Bravo’s dick weeks ago. But she has to get past Hotel, too. The current plan is to steal Bravo’s stun gun and zap Hotel with it on the way out. But that plan can go wrong in a million different ways, so she’s been reluctant to try it, hoping a better opportunity comes along.
And a better opportunity must have. Because if she had attacked Hotel, Bravo wouldn’t have needed to ask me where she’d gone.
She slinks past the stall across from Handlebar’s. I begin to shake, tension and excitement battling for control of my nerves. My gaze bounces from Lissa to Hotel. I keep expecting him to walk around the side of the barn for a piss or because he heard something that drew his attention, or any reason that allowed Lissa to slip past him. Because she’s not far from the exit now and—
“What the hell?” Charlie sits forward in his chair, frowning at the monitor showing the security feed from the camera nearest the barn’s entrance.
Confused, I stare at the same screen. Lissa’s clearly visible. The view is at a downward angle, because the camera’s mounted at about the same height as the top of the stall doors and on the same side of the aisle that she is. But although she’s still crouching slightly, her knees half-bent, now her upper body is upright and she’s not facing forward anymore. Instead her back is pressed against the stall door behind her, her head against the bars. Almost as if she’s trying to make herself as unnoticeable as possible, flattening herself against the nearest wall. Maybe she heard something? She seems tense, straining—but I missed whatever alarmed her because I’d been looking at Hotel.
Charlie sucks in a breath. “Oh fuck fuck fuck.”
I glance at another monitor and my stomach drops. The different camera angle reveals a thick forearm reaching through the bars, the giant hand clamped over Lissa’s mouth, her wide, terrified eyes—and the huge shadow behind her.
Tusk.
Paralyzed by shock and horror, I watch her fight him. She claws wildly at his hand and wrist, drawing bloody streaks, but his grip doesn’t loosen. Yet she must have gotten away from him. She had to have gotten away because he’s locked behind those bars. No way to pull her inside his cell, no way for him to get out. So if Tusk had hurt her, they’d have found her there in the aisle, in front of his stall.
Abruptly she’s yanked upward, off her feet. Then higher. As if he’s hauling her to the top of the stall but nothing’s there but more bars. The original stalls didn’t have ceilings, just empty space up to the rafters, so the horses wouldn’t hit their heads if they reared up. When they made these stables into prisons, they simply laid more bars across the top of each box stall. I’ve seen the fighters using them to do pull-ups. And I’ve stared up at them from my bed, thinking that even though the bars aren’t as narrowly spaced as the ones at the front of the stall, they’re still too narrow for my brother to fit through. But a woman with a small frame—especially one who is half starved, because Papa prefers girls who are model-thin—might be able to squeeze between them. I’ve just never tried it because I thought the cameras would catch me in the act.
But everything above the stall doors is in the cameras’ blind spots. And Lissa’s almost as scrawny as I am.
Unable to breathe, I watch Tusk drag her even higher. Lissa kicks wildly, trying to pull out of that grip, and my bright, hopeful certainty that she got away from him withers into cold, sick dread.
He hauls her over the top of the stall door. Her head and torso vanish from the cameras’ view—and with that disappearance my frozen horror shatters into terrified desperation.
“Lissa!”
I bolt for the door, the tray of pills crashing to the floor. The image of her legs flailing from a half dozen different angles is seared behind my eyes, and it’s the only thing I see as I charge blindly across the aisle.
“Cherry, stop!”
I scream again, this time in rage and frustration when Victor catches my arm and yanks me to a halt. Fighting him, I try to get closer to the bars, frantic to see inside the stall. Tusk’s powerful, hulking form seems to fill his cell, a thickly muscled mountain of naked, hairless skin. On some level, I’m aware that Victor’s hold is saving me from the same fate as Lissa, because Tusk could grab me, too, the moment I neared that stall door. But those six hours that I’d rejoiced over, thinking that she’d have so much time to escape this nightmare, have become six hours that she’s been stuck in a terrifying hell. I can’t bear the thought of delaying her rescue another second.
But even throwing my weight forward gets me nowhere. My high heels only slip and scrabble against the concrete floor. Victor’s fingers are like steel clamps around my upper arm, but the pain of his tight grip and his bruising strength barely register over the dread and agony ripping at my heart. My breath comes in sobbing gasps as Victor draws his Taser and aims it into Tusk’s stall.
“Back away from the bars.” Victor snaps out the order over the commotion coming from the other stalls—the fighters yelling, wondering what the hel
l is happening. Matt’s voice is mixed up in those shouts, an extra edge of fear in it. Fear for me. “Get into the restraints. Now.”
Obediently Tusk turns around and backs up against the stall door, raising his arms straight up and placing his wrists into the manacles welded to the bars for this purpose. No one’s fooled by his meek compliance. Victor’s aim doesn’t waver as he gestures Charlie forward. The younger guard approaches the bars slowly, cautiously—then, in a flash, he reaches out to snap the manacles closed, as if fearing in that instant Tusk will catch him and drag him through the bars, too.
With Tusk secured, I begin struggling against Victor again, trying to get closer to the stall. Victor still doesn’t relax or let me go. “Feet.”
The guards don’t always bother with the ankle restraints when they have to enter a fighter’s stall, but they don’t leave anything to chance with Tusk. A slot in the bottom of the wooden door slides open, giving Charlie access to the big man’s ankles. It seems an eternity passes before he fastens the chain links with a steel carabiner.
“Go unlock the door,” Victor tells him next—and releases my arm.
Jolting forward, I slam against the front of the stall. I grip the bars and my gaze frantically searches the small space…not seeing her. Not on the bed or under it, not on the floor.
Then I crane my neck and rise up onto my toes, so I can peer straight down. A cry breaks from me when I spot tangled auburn hair. She’s crammed against the solid wood of the door, less than an inch from my knees.
“Lissa!” I shout but she doesn’t move, doesn’t respond. “Hurry, Charlie! She’s here against the door, right here—”
The clunk sounds. I shove the sliding door open and Lissa slumps into the aisle, her red hair spilling over my feet.
And we’re too late. I know it even before I see the bruises around her neck or press my fingers to her inner wrist, praying for a pulse.
“How is she?” Victor crouches beside me, holstering his Taser, but not even looking at the lifeless woman on the concrete floor. Instead his watchful gaze remains on Tusk. “Cherry?”
“She’s gone,” I tell him, my voice a broken rasp. “She’s already cold.”
Tusk’s grating laugh answers me. “Cold now. But you’d be surprised how long that cunt stayed warm.”
My head jerks up, grief and horror lodged like a sharp, hot stone in my throat.
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” Victor warns him.
But that warning doesn’t mean a thing. We all know it. Victor won’t touch Papa’s prize fighter.
And Tusk is getting off on this. Papa didn’t even have to threaten any family members before Tusk agreed to fight in the Cage. He likes killing. But until this moment, I didn’t realize how much he relishes grief and pain, too. He’s staring at me now as if my agony is an arousing feast, his eyes gleaming hungrily and bloodlust engorging his dick.
“But there’s a downside to killing her so quick and keeping her quiet,” he continues with undisguised glee, and I try not to listen to him, my hands shaking and tears blurring my vision as I attempt to straighten her torn clothes. “I didn’t get to hear her scream—”
“Enough!” Victor snaps.
“—and without her heart pumping she didn’t bleed as much as I’d hoped. Not like Cherry’ll scream and bleed when I pop that—”
Everything seems to slow. It doesn’t, of course. It’s just adrenaline charging through my body and changing my perception, so that every step I take seems diamond-sharp and clear, as if formed by an eon of intense heat and pressure. Yet the change only takes an instant, a nuclear blast that transforms grief to rage, and action is the fallout.
I snatch the Taser from Victor’s holster and launch myself at Tusk. In the split second that it takes me to close the distance, his eyes flare wide with surprise, his naked body tensing. But despite that involuntary reaction, no fear fills his expression—instead he grins, as if my attack amuses him.
Then he’ll really enjoy this. I jam the stun gun against his testicles. “How about you scream for me?” I coldly suggest and pull the trigger.
He doesn’t scream. He can’t. His teeth snap together and his muscles contract as the electrical current surges through his balls.
Only a second passes before Victor rips the weapon from my hand, but the icy satisfaction of witnessing his agony seems to last for another crystalline eon—and I only pray that it feels like an eternity to Tusk. His body sags against the restraints as Victor roughly drags me back, then Tusk snaps back to enraged motion—roaring my name, fighting against the manacles, murderous intent in the gaze he fixes on me.
Victor shoves me through the stall door. I stumble over Lissa’s body and renewed pain tears through me, overwhelming the burning rage that briefly cauterized the bleeding wound that her death had ripped open inside me.
“Jesus, Cherry.” That disbelieving comment comes from Charlie, but I barely hear him as I sink to the concrete next to Lissa and lift her head onto my lap. I know I should be afraid of how Papa will punish me—or Matt—for what I just did to his most valuable fighter. I should be terrified. But there’s no room for fear in me, not while I hold her as close as I can, my hot tears falling on her cold skin. There’s only room for pain and grief. Then Tusk begins laughing and loudly singing along with Elton.
The circle of life. A song that I used to happily sing along with Matt when we were kids. A song that Lissa and I sang together here, trying to recapture a little joy and the memory of life outside this prison. A song that her murderer is singing along with as a joke.
Suddenly there’s room for one more emotion within me: the despairing certainty that I’ll die here, but it won’t be a mercifully quick death. Instead they’ll kill me little by little, destroying every bit of life and hope within me long before my body is dead. Only a few minutes ago, I’d been so sure that this nightmare was almost over.
Instead it has just begun.
3
I don’t know what they do with Lissa’s body. Probably the same thing that they’ll do with Bravo’s. The crack of the gunshot that marks his execution comes just before eleven that morning, a few minutes after Crash and Handlebar finish their five-mile run. Both bikers and the two guards who are serving as my escort go momentarily still and look in that direction, but I continue writing Handlebar’s and Crash’s pulse rates into their charts without a single hesitation.
The gaping hole that Lissa’s murder has torn open inside me is empty now. Matt is terrified that I’ll be executed, too, but I don’t feel anything except numb. It’s a form of shock, maybe. Or some other coping mechanism that kicked in. Whatever it is allowed me to get through the hours after we found her, because curling up in a ball and crying wasn’t an option. Instead Victor dragged me to my feet, ordered me to clean up the pills I spilled, and continue the fighters’ health checks.
So I did. Then I began the exercise rotations, and although the short walk out to the track is usually filled with jokes between the fighters—being allowed outside always puts them in a good mood—this morning they were distinctly subdued. Almost everyone liked Lissa. Even the guys who are here because they took the bait she dangled. I heard a couple of them swear to end Tusk if they ever got into the Cage with him. And almost everyone has congratulated me for getting the drop on Victor and laughed when they heard where I’d zapped Tusk.
Everyone except Matt. Each mention of it just makes him more afraid for me.
But not even once does he tell me that I shouldn’t have done it. That’s not who he is. What’s done is done. So all that matters is what needs to be done next.
I’ve begun to regret my actions, though. Not what I did to Tusk—I’ll never regret that, unless Papa decides to take his anger out on Matt. But I don’t think he will. Fighters are too valuable, so whatever he does, it’ll be done to me. And I just can’t find it in myself to care all that much.
Instead my regret is focused in another direction. Because I did everything right. I kept m
y eyes open, the way Matt taught me to. I noticed that when Victor holstered his Taser, he didn’t fasten the strap that secures the weapon. I knew that his gaze wasn’t on me, but on Tusk. I knew that Tango had left the barn to round up Bravo, leaving only Charlie and Victor on duty.
So in that long, diamond-sharp time…I could have taken out Victor. I could have stunned Charlie when he came out of the booth. And I could have freed all of the fighters. Escape wouldn’t have been certain. We’d have had to fight our way past the other guards up at the farmhouse. But we’d have had the advantage of surprise…and a chance.
Until I squandered that chance.
Lissa was killed because she’d been trying to find a way for us all to escape—and her death provided the one real opportunity that we’ve had.
But I fucked it up. None of these guys seem to realize how much my rage cost all of us. I know it, though. And the pain of that knowledge is almost enough to pierce the numbness as we return to the barn.
But I’m more aware of the subtle glances passing between Handlebar and Crash as they talk—not really saying anything, just a random conversation about some guy they both know, and loudly enough for the guards to overhear. But I swear there’s an undercurrent, as if another conversation is taking place beneath the audible one. The same kind of conversation that took place right before Handlebar snapped a guard’s neck.
As we enter the barn, though, the next look they share seems hot with frustration. Because they weren’t going to take out a guard, I realize. They’d been hoping to kill Tusk, who has been locked up in his restraints—his back against the bars and his head vulnerable to anyone passing by his stall. No doubt one of them planned to rush our guards while the other got his hands around Tusk’s head and broke his neck.
Except that plan won’t work now. Two more guards stand outside of Tusk’s open stall—not watching him, but watching over Doc, who’s examining the big fighter.