My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking as I follow him slowly, descending the set of stairs.
The frail old man stops in the middle of the room, several feet back from the cloudy glass of the tank, suddenly unable to take another step forward. He reaches out around himself, searching for something to steady himself as his legs tremble violently a moment, and staggers to the closest piece of furniture, one of the console tables full of buttons and dials.
Before I can rush to his side, I glimpse the shape of a large bat-like wing pressed briefly against the glass, disappearing back into the depths, obscured by the condensation covering most of the tank.
With shaky breath, I approach, stopping just inches from the glass. I wipe my palm against the surface in front of my face trying to see inside better.
For a moment, nothing.
A loud noise startles me back a step as a fist slams against the tank’s wall. The glass beats, shakes as another clawed hand comes down through the water, stopped only at the wall between us. The dark blue shape looms several inches over me, pressed against the wall.
I reach up, my hands moved by the memory of finding Ellis’s face above mine when he held me, wiping the glass clear to reveal him, pained. My palm hovers inches over his cheek, only my shadow able to touch him.
He doesn’t look completely himself, but I know it’s him.
His chest rises and falls in oddly languid drags, his head rolled back on his shoulder, a crush of anguish carved into his face. His teeth are bared in a snarl at the magnitude of his distress, and the four sharpest that usually frame his smile looka lot more pronounced. The palm flexing against his prison has long, thick claws.
The tension rakes across his arms, his shoulders, his neck, his whole body consumed by pain, that makes him look grossly defined, a feverishly imagined horror of a body that you only see at the movies.
“My sweet boy, what has he done to you?” Maestro whispers in horror from several steps behind me.
I don’t have to ask who he means. I can’t believe it took me this long to see what was right in front of me.
“You never did come back with my drink.”
Clayton’s voice comes from above, startling us. I whirl around, clutching a hand to my chest to keep my heart from falling out.
He stands high on the metal catwalk that lines the room’s perimeter, looking down on us as he sweeps his cape around the back of him. “You know, it was adorable when you kept snooping around as if the ooze was some kind of plot, looking around for a culprit to blame for it. But this really crosses a line, Lacey.”
“Clayton, I, um—” I stammer, looking around, as he descends the stairs from the only exit. There’s no getting out of this.
“You’re going to be late to the award ceremony. It’s about to start,” Clayton says like he doesn’t have Ellis in a fucking science experiment as he arrives at the bottom of the stairs. The way that he doesn’t acknowledge anything about how bizarre it is that all this is down here only fills me with terror.
Maestro puts himself between me and Clayton, who bats him aside easily with the power armor. The old man crumples into a pile on the grated metal floor, and I scream.
Clayton only smiles in response. Then he presses a button on his robotic glove.
At first, I’m not sure what that did, but as the muffled scream barely escapes the tank behind me, I whirl around and realize he’s causing Ellis more pain.
“Stop it, stop! Don’t hurt him,” I shriek, panicking. I don’t know what else to do but surrender.
Clayton rolls his eyes, unaffected by the clear suffering he’s causing. Still, he presses the button again, and Ellis slumps down against the glass.
“There’s more where that came from if you fail to cooperate,” he says easily, holding out a hand to me.
Nausea rises in my throat at the thought of taking his hand, but in my moment of hesitation, he raises a brow and moves to press the button again. I stand quickly and cross to his side.
He nods to Maestro, and then to the tank, and a number of his goons step out of the shadows. One of them ties Maestro to a chair, and two more get to work moving the tank, unhooking it from the floor.
I have never felt so powerless as we return to the party upstairs. My throat is so tight with emotion, I can barely get out a word, but I mutter, “You can’t do this.”
Clayton rolls his eyes and scoffs. “Spare me the theatrics, Lacey. We both know how this is going to go.”
He’s right. In so many ways, it feels like every fight we’ve ever had. Always ending with my head down, cowed by hisanger. I am just his damsel in distress. Once the distress is over, I become nothing again.
Utterly numb, I drift through the crowd at his side. He laughs and greets people like nothing at all happened downstairs. His assistant eventually comes and takes me away by the arm and deposits me backstage.
Standing behind the curtain is almost preferable to having to try to smile at people and wave off any concern while Clayton grips my arm.
