“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—”
“Well, no,” Lana said, sitting forward with a smirk. “How you ended up here is you fucked your mentor professor, don’t leave out that bit. I was there. Saw quite a bit of your behind.”
&
nbsp; Alessia felt herself going red. But she had Lana’s attention, however uncomfortable it was. This was going somewhere, at least. This was some kind of bonding. She hoped.
“Yes,” she said with a crack in her voice. “That’s how I got here. You took Drake and I went looking for him in the wrong place—or I guess in the right place since I found him. Your turn.”
“This isn’t a therapy session.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not like we have anything better to do here.”
She could see the cogs working in Lana’s head through the confusion in her eyes. She wanted to talk. She probably didn’t get a lot of chances to talk to anyone while she was down here. In fact, she was the only woman Alessia had seen the entire time. And if there was one thing she learned in her nearly three decades as a woman, women always craved other women. Even if it was your worst enemy or the girl who stole your prom date. Any woman was better than a room full of men.
“Shifter’s gotta do what a shifter’s gotta do,” Lana said, shrugging. “It’s not like anyone wants to hire you too much when they find out what you are.”
“There’s laws against that,” Alessia said with a frown, coming forward to sit at the edge of the cell, leaning against the bars.
“Yeah, and there’s also laws against shooting people and robbing them but every morning what’s on the news?” Lana said. “People will do what they want.”
“What is it you wanted to do?” Alessia asked. “My friend, Trish, she got kicked out of an audience once.”
“Shifter?”
“Wolf. Which apparently is a sin here.”
Lana shrugged. “I personally don’t see any difference between dragon or wolf or whatever obscure shifter type might still be out there. Who gives a fuck? It’s James who gets all elitist about it and I’m in a job only because I happened to be born the right kind of society outcast.”
Alessia looked at Lana and saw something completely different in her eyes—a person. Lana looked tired and she looked far smaller than her bombastic sarcasm wanted her to seem when first Alessia met her. They had gotten somewhere and she was afraid to push for more because this was something important. So she stayed quiet and Lana didn’t say anymore. It felt like an understanding. And that was step one towards friendship.
Chapter 5
It was after two more days of talking with Lana, about things far less heavy.
“If you say the movies are better than the books, I will actually waterboard you.”
“Lana, all I’m saying is there is some merit in adaptation.”
Alessia felt more comfortable with her than anyone else in this place, maybe even more so than with Drake.
That had been something that had been weighing on her too. She wanted to find him, she’d been desperate for it. And then she did. She was ecstatic to find him alive and missed him while she was alone in her own cell. But she also couldn’t shake the knowledge that he had been lying to her about things. That he knew more than he was letting on. She expected things like this from James or his cronies. But Drake was being cagey when what they needed, now more than ever, was to be open and honest with each other.
“What’s going on in there?” Lana asked.
“Huh?”
“I just said that Amy should have won The Bachelor and you didn’t react. So, what’s going on in that head?”
“Well, I would have ignored that incredibly wrong statement no matter what,” Alessia said and Lana snorted and smirked. “But, just have a lot on my mind.”
“What, you got a busy schedule of twiddling your thumbs and marking another day on the wall?”
Alessia rolled her eyes but smiled a bit, all the same. She wondered if they were at the point where they could talk about things like this yet. It wasn’t even that Alessia wanted to get more information out of Lana. She just wanted someone to unload this information on because it ate at her, more than just a bit, with nothing but the wall to bounce her ideas back at her.
Should she trust Drake? She trusted him far more than she trusted James. But she realized Drake was a man she hardly knew. He was her professor or barely was forthcoming about letting her participate in class work, let alone about the truth when she was kidnapped by his own faction.
“Just—stuff,” Alessia said lamely.
“Yeah. I’ve heard of it. Tell me more.”
Lana was good entertainment, she was fun to talk to. But was she a friend? Alessia was slowly losing her mind in this place and, for all she knew, Lana was playing her. She could be falling for some unfortunate Stockholm Syndrome. But at this point, what did she have to lose?
“I don’t know if I can completely trust Drake.”
“She says only after she fucks him.”
“I’m serious.”
“Can you trust anyone? You’re in the middle of a war now, kid. This is a war you had no idea was going on and you don’t even know which side has you captive, but that’s the way these things go. Take what trust you can. No one’s going to tell you the whole truth, not by a long shot.”
“Does that include you?”
“Fucking right it does. The only person I trust one hundred percent with all my thoughts is me. And you should do the same and learn to be okay with it. Even if you end up marrying Tekkin someday or some nonsense. You’re never going to one hundred percent give it all to each other. No one does. If you go into a marriage knowing that, your life will be a lot less painful when it all breaks down.”
Alessia didn’t want to admit the very good point there. She wanted the romanticism of it, just a little bit. She wanted to believe in some goodness and in some fairy tale parts of her life. She and Drake could be some kind of Romeo and Juliet without the suicide at the end, but that’s not the way things worked. The suicide happened because they were naive and careless, Alessia would have to be smarter than all that.
She sighed and sat back against the wall. She would have to weigh her options. She truly trusted no one. So, who were the ones she distrusted less than others?
**
A few days later, they let her see Erik. Lana came into the cell and told her they set up a meeting with him in the interrogation room. This time she didn’t drag her out of the cell with rough hands and yanking limbs. She let her walk freely down the hall to her destination without forcing her along like a puppy on a leash. They’d come that far at least. Though Alessia doubted that Lana would truly let her perhaps walk right out of this place one day. At least she had some semblance of a friend.
She walked into the room and sat in a chair. Now it was set up with a table in the middle. Erik sitting on one side, watched by some hulking man that Alessia had seen around the base before. She dropped into the chair across from him. He looked better. His deep purple bruises had gone the green color of healing around the edges and both his eyes were open fully once again. His cuts were fading and scabbed over. He looked more awake but he was thinner than she remembered, a bit more gaunt in the face. The deadness in his eyes seemed to be chased away, like bugs in a flashlight, when he saw her.
“Alessia,” he wheezed out. She cringed. He needed a doctor.
“Hi,” she said softly, wondering if their handlers would snap if she reached out and took his hand. “How are you?”
“Better. But not good,” he laughed. “You look better than I was afraid you would.”
“I think it’s because I know how to not mouth off,” Alessia said with a laugh but immediately regretted it for the implication that Erik was somehow responsible for his own wounds. He smiled and shrugged.
“You know I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut,” he said. “Those debates in the seminar were a warm up for this. The big leagues.”
“Convince anyone to back your shifter resource sustainability plan?”
“Not a damn chance.”
They chuckled together and then got silent again. Alessia wasn’t sure what the point of this was. Lana hadn’t said much on t
he way there and there was no obvious agenda for their discussions. Was it simply to see that Erik was still alive? Would it become part of a larger blackmail? She was happy to see him okay and on the mend, but what she really wanted to know now was if Diego was alive. She hadn’t seen him since they’d been brought there and only had James’ word from days and days ago that Diego was still alive.
“Have you seen Diego?” she asked, waiting for Lana or the man behind Erik to jump up at some taboo conversation between prisoners. But they didn’t move an inch.
“A few days back,” Erik said. “He looks okay. Not beat up or anything but pretty thin and tired.”
So, he was alive as of a few days ago. Alessia had to tell Erik what she knew though. “These are all dragon shifters,” she said, low in the voice. “Diego is apparently some kind of minority here because he’s a wolf.”
“You think they’ll kill him?” Erik asked, leaning in.
“I don’t know. Drake said this isn’t a place that Orlando controls but that doesn’t mean they don’t share his prejudices,” she said.
She was waiting for the blow, for someone to tell them they had to change topics. Lana and the man could certainly hear them but they let them speak. Alessia wondered if that was important or not. But she decided she needed to get out as much as she possibly could, while she could.
“So, what’s next for us then?” Erik asked.
“I don’t know. They could have killed us already.”
“They also could have let us go.”
Alessia’s face went grim. They were truly stuck in a limbo that she didn’t know the outcome. There was no obvious plot here, no obvious way she was being driven. They were just existing as prisoners, fed, occasionally allowed to shower and use the bathroom, and then returned to their cells where she had a debate with her captor about the merits of the film adaptations of Lord of the Rings.
There was a lot they could have done. They were keeping them around for something. She thought of the story of Diego’s girlfriend and the horrific way it ended. Perhaps in the end they’d force them to carry out some awful plot. Maybe this meeting between her and Erik was a way to placate them until then.
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