“You remind me of a dog I once had as a child,” he said, voice drifting, as he stared at Caiden. “It bit and bit, until one day my father broke its jaw with a brick. Still tried to bite with its mouth hanging open. That’s what you are. That’s what you’ll always be. An animal with nothing but its bite left.”
“Fuck you,” Caiden snapped.
The man ignored him.
“You know, at first I wasn’t sure which of you would make the better subject. But in the end, it’s always the girl.” He said this like it was a law of science, a principle etched into the marrow of the universe.
He unlocked the cage on my side with a flourish, the click echoing through the basement like a gunshot. I tried to scramble away, but my body was spent; I managed only a pathetic crab-walk to the far corner, clutching my knees to my chest.
Caiden’s shout vibrated the glass, a wordless, animal sound, but there was nothing he could do.
The man stood over me, silhouette tall and precise, his expression one of infinite patience, as if he could wait forever for me to exhaust myself.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” he said, and he grabbed my shoulder, anchoring me to the filthy slab of concrete.
I thought I’d panic, or scream, but there wasn’t enough air left in my body.
I just watched him, eyes wide, time stretching into a dream.
I could see each pore on his face, the sick shine of saliva webbing his lips, the slow dilation of his pupils as his hand closed around my throat. Not tight enough to kill, just enough to make me want the next breath more than anything.
His fingers dug into the bruises already mappedacross my skin. It was almost an act of cartography: charting pain, tracing the fault lines of every old wound, every remembered violation.
I heard Caiden’s body strike the glass again, a dull, meaty thud, and the man’s smile crept wider, savoring the sound.
On some level I knew he was doing it for Caiden, for the way it made him howl, the way his rage fogged the divider and left it streaked with spit and blood.
We were the show, the dark mirror, and every twitch of agony was a gift to the audience.
He pressed his mouth to my ear, the breath hot and reeking of old cigarettes. “You’re going to thank me for this,” he whispered. “You’re going to remember me for the rest of your short, beautiful life.”
I heard Caiden’s fists, the scrape of his body against the divider, the animal grunt in his throat.
The man seemed to savor it; he tilted his head, listening to our misery as if it were a composition he’d written himself.
He turned me to face the glass, so I could see Caiden, so Caiden could see me.
I tried to avert my eyes, but the man’s fist closed in the nest of my hair and jerked my chin up until my gaze met Caiden’s through the greasy, smudged partition.
There was a helplessness in Caiden’s face I’d never seen before, and it felt like a new kind of death.
The next part was fast, and slow, and endless.
I was loopy from the drugged food, but still there.
Everything after that was a stuttering reel, the world breaking into single frames: his hand clamped at the base of my skull; my body going numb except for a thick, burning ache everywhere he touched; the wet click of his tongue; the animal, senseless noises from the other side of the glass.
My face was mashed flat against the divider, Caiden’s eyes just inches away, wide and crazed and wet.
I didn’t cry or scream or beg. There wasn’t any point. I’d been emptied, scraped out by days of fear and hunger and previous iterations of this exact trauma.
I watched myself from outside my body, a ghost watching ameat puppet, and I realized this was probably the only way to survive it.
It was a performance, a ritual, I realized. The man had done this before. I could tell by the way he spaced his words, the way he forced me to watch the reflection of myself as he pulled my hair, the way he adjusted my hips for the best view, the best angle of despair.
It was calculated. He liked to see the ruin he made.
In the sick darkness, I had a moment of clarity.
