The Artistry of Love

by C. J. Scarlett

  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 whispered 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.

  Then there was the matter of what Damien seemed to have planned for her. It wasn’t to starve her out because she received food and some water in the form of a plastic bottle and a Power Bar every so often. They didn’t want to kill her in the cell. At first, she didn’t eat it, fearing there might be some kind of poison laced inside the food and water. But after a while, she was unable to stop herself from eating with the growls of her stomach and the severe pangs of pure, sharp pain radiating from her torso from the lack of food.

  She didn’t die, so the next time they dropped off food, she ate it again. It became her pattern. She ate food and drank water and measured the days that way. She figured they were giving her two a day, one in the morning and one at night. It certainly wasn’t enough calories to sustain her long term and she was sure the next time she looked into a mirror, she would see something gaunt and unrecognizable staring back at her. If she ever got out of here, it would be very hard to explain where she’d been when she emerged looking exactly like the prisoner of war she seemed to be right now.

  It wasn’t until several days in that someone finally returned to the cell and she realized how much she’d missed and craved human attention from someone, the ability to communicate with someone. It was a guard, someone she’d never seen before who looked angry and unfriendly, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to know that she wasn’t the last human left in the universe, even if her only other options were the ones imprisoning her and putting her in danger. She’d take it. Maybe that’s how people fell into Stockholm Syndrome. They wanted attention and contact so much that they’d take it even from the maniacs who imprisoned them.

  He silently walked up to her and opened the gate with a loud creak of the metal. It swung open and he stared at her, stepping back and gesturing for her to step out. She, at first, thought this had to be some kind of trick or test. There was no way that they would let her walk out of the cell of her own accord. And even if they were, it wasn’t to anywhere good, she was sure. She didn’t know in what way but it was clearly a game, clearly some kind of trick.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, hearing her own voice for the first time in so long. It was rough, scratchy, almost unrecognizable.

  “You step out of that cell or I go in there and drag you out. Your call, lady,” he said back.

  She wouldn’t get answers. Honestly, what did she expect anyway? She’d come this far with absolutely no one giving her anything to go off of, why should right now, the time when it seemed they would force her to walk to her death, be any different?

  She stepped out, because what else could she do? She had no desire to fight this anymore. Their designs on keeping her locked away in that cell with barely any food and water to go on, with no one to talk to, had done its job. She was obedient, submissive. She was willing to do whatever they asked because she had no other desire or intention to live for, nothing to want for on her own. She had nothing she needed, she was no one. They’d broken her completely.

  So, she stepped out of the cell and stopped where he told her to stop, and stood there, waiting for her next instructions. She walked down the hall where she was told to walk, turned when she was told to turn. She was nothing. She was their puppet, their slave, their ghost sliding through the halls. The lawyer to-be, the runner, the daughter, the girlfriend, the everything that Andrea had been before this moment was gone completely. She was over, there was nothing left of her to put up a fight. So she wouldn’t. She would prolong the existence she had left for as long as possible with obedience and silence and go from there.

  #

  They lead her to a room she hadn’t been in yet. That wasn’t a surprise. There were also people here she didn’t know, men and women she hadn’t seen before. They looked at her with the same unfamiliar and unkind expression everyone had given her thus far. They stood around a table. It was a meeting room. She didn’t see Diego. There was no friendly face. She wondered what all their animals were, how she would die.

  “Welcome, Miss Andi.”

  If she ever got the chance to dream again, that was a voice that would haunt her in her sleep. Damien stood there with such a coolness, like the cold and dark of the world itself came from him. She shivered thinking about what his dragon form must look like in its fullest. She imagined a demon with those all too human eyes. That’s what made evil so terrifying, of course. Evil was human at its core. You couldn’t be evil without eyes like Damien’s that had once belonged to a child, a son, a newborn baby that, somewhere along the way, had turned into something awful.

  She didn’t say anything, though there was a pause that she was fairly certain she was meant to fill. She had nothing to say to him. What could she possibly say? Sentences wouldn’t form. She was a shell. It didn’t even occur to her to be sad, to cry, that Diego might be dead already. She would never see her mother again or her father. Her family would wonder for years and years what happened to her because she doubted her death, and the nature of it, would be made known to the world. Damien would make her disappear from the world.

  “You will do a favor for us,” he said. “And then you will go free.”

  The words just sort of bounced off her at first. She took that at face value. She would perform a service for Damien. Then he would set her free. Fair enough. He looked at her though with a cocked eyebrow and a frown.

  “Didn’t you hear me, Andi?” he said. This time she couldn’t get out of speaking.

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that excite you? I will let you go free,” he repeated.

  He lingered on the word free with a measured hiss. He made the syllables stretch out and mean something. Free. He would let her go. She would do something for him and then she would walk away. She’d be able to shower, she’d be able to sleep in her own bed. She’d see her own apartment again and her parents. She’d be able to hug her mother and she’d never let her go. She’d apologize for every single time she’d said something inconsiderate or wrong.

  She’d be out of this hellhole. This entire world she’d been forced to create in her mind, with her own imprisonment, it’d be gone. It would be a memory. And memories couldn’t hurt you, not really, not when they were over. Damien would linger, but she could escape him in the light of day.

  “Yes,” she answered him finally, breathlessly. “It does.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because you need to do your job correctly or you won’t be able to get anywhere, you understand? You follow our instructions to a T and you do your job and you get to leave. If you don’t, you come back here and it’s a lot less pleasant. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. He walked around the table and toward Andrea, smelling sour, like a snake. He pointed to the screen that showed a park. “That’s where you will be going. It’s a nice place. Lots of people will be there, lots of eyes, and lots of cameras. That’s good for us. We want you to be seen by as many people as possible, understand? Everyone needs to see you.”

  “Okay.” She’d go naked if she had to, if it meant she would get out of here.

  “You will wear a special vest for us. Pretty easy, right?” Sure. Easy. Perfect. “And when the time comes, you will push a button… then the vest will explode.”

  Oh.

  Every single dream she had up until that moment crumbled. She watched the images of her mother’s face, the distant smell she could remember of her childhood living room at Christmas, then it was gone. It was stolen from her like a drowning man being dragged farther and farther below, watching the sun get dimmer and dimmer as the pressure around her increased. She was
n’t going free. They were letting her go because she would die.

  “If you don’t press the button,” he said. “If you choose to run. We will blow it up for you. I will be a lot less happy, but you won’t have to worry about that too much.”

  So that was that. This was how it ended, not with starving, not with torture. They would use her to make their points. They would force her to publicly do something that would get a lot of people hurt. Would her mother watch the news and wonder where she went wrong? Why her daughter would do something so heinous and awful? She wanted nothing more than to let her mother know that she wasn’t doing this on purpose. She wasn’t doing it willingly. She didn’t want to hurt anyone.

  “Where’s Diego?” she choked out. She needed to know there was at least one good thing in the world, that Diego was alive, that he could go on, go home to his family.

  “He’s around,” Damien said and she wasn’t sure if she could trust his word play. “Would you like to see him?”

  “Yes,” she nearly gasped, trying not to sound too desperate or terrified.

  She needed to see Diego. She needed something. She needed to touch something familiar, soft, anything that might lead her home from the darkness she was trapped in. She nodded fervently and prayed it wasn’t a trick. She prayed he was alive, that she wouldn’t be shoved into a room with a body when they claimed that they would let her see him.

  “Well then, since you’re helping us out so much, I can’t possibly deny you one last request while you’re our guest, can I?”

  She didn’t say anything. She was out of words. She imagined a world where she ended up with Charles. The heartache and irritation would have been worth being allowed to live now. She desperately wished she had that foresight. But, at the same time, she couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t know Diego. She was meant to, she needed to. She would live the rest of her life with a gaping hole if she hadn’t met him and she’d never know why. Of course, at least she’d be living.

  #