Thad was on his back in the cage, staring at the ceiling. He’d lost more weight since my last visit. His arms were skeletal and his cheekbones jutted out at angles that made his face look like a skull wearing skin. His eyes were closed when I walked in, and for a second I thought he might be dead and something in my chest lurched before I saw the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
Still alive. Still rotting. Still mine.
“Wake up,” I said.
His eyes opened slowly and he turned his head toward me. The hatred in his face used to bother me. It didn’t anymore. Hatred was the only thing keeping him alive, and we both knew it.
“You look like shit,” I said.
“And you look like a pussy-ass bitch who ain’t got the guts to finish what she started.” His voice was a rasp now, dry and cracked from dehydration and disuse. “It’s been months, Mehar. Fuckin’ months and you still can’t pull the trigger. You know why? Because deep down you know you ain’t about this life. You playing dress-up. Playing gangster. Playing tough. But you’re still the same scared little girl who let men run her whole life.”
I crouched down to his level and looked at him through the bars.
“The next time I come here,” I said, and my voice was quiet and steady and came from a place so deep inside me that it didn’t sound like Dame CoCo or Mehar or anyone he’d ever met, “I will be slitting your throat. That’s not a threat and it’s not a deadline you can negotiate. It’s a fact. So if you’ve got prayers to say or a God to talk to, I’d start now.”
His jaw tightened, but something behind his eyes shifted. A flicker of something that might have been fear, quick andgone, but I caught it. After months of defiance and threats and promises to slit MY throat, he finally believed me.
“Good,” I said. “Now drink this water. I don’t want you dying of dehydration before I get the satisfaction of doing it myself.”
I slid the bottle through the slot and walked out without looking back.
In the car, I sat with my hands on the steering wheel and thought about the two men I’d just left behind. Rios, who knelt for me voluntarily and walked away untouched. And Thad, who I’d broken completely and was about to end permanently. Two extremes of the same dynamic—power and submission, control and surrender. Neither one of them made me feel the way Quest did.
That was the difference Janelle couldn’t see. The dungeon was work. The cage was revenge. But Quest was something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with the terrifying possibility that I could be loved without having to be in control of it.
I started the car and drove home. I needed to get ready for tomorrow because it was the casino’s grand opening.
40
MEHAR
Quest had been different since Rita’s birthday.
He still went to work, still handled business, still showed up wherever he needed to show up. But the warmth behind his eyes had gone cold. He talked less. Laughed never. He moved through his days like a machine running a program that didn’t include feelings. He answered calls about the casino because the grand opening was tomorrow and business didn’t stop for personal crises. But he’d been ignoring Rita’s calls for days. Ignored Prime. Ignored Mekhi. Everybody who wasn’t directly connected to money or the opening got silence.
Everybody except me. I was the only person he let close.
I’d been spending nights at the hotel since the overlook. He hadn’t asked me to. I just showed up. Brought food. Sat beside him when the silence was what he needed.
“What are you gonna do about Thad?” he asked while he was knotting his tie. Just like that. Casual. Like he was asking about dinner plans.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“When?”
“Soon. This week maybe. I just need help with the body.”
“I got you.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. Just kept working the tie. “Let me know when and I’ll handle the rest.”
I was getting dressed in a fitted emerald dress that he’d bought for me at the mall, gold accessories, heels when he came up behind me and put his hands on my waist and pressed his mouth against my neck.
“We don’t have time,” I said, already feeling my body betray my words.
“I just need five minutes.”
“You have never spent five minutes between my thighs.”
He kissed my neck again and his hands started moving south and I grabbed his wrists and held them.
