“I guess so,” Jasper says and takes his first step down the hall. “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t expecting this either.”
A few feet away is a large panel of black glass that reaches from the floor to the ceiling, and next to it the number D-1, spray-painted on the brick with a stencil.
“Is that a cell?” I ask.
We both stare into the shadows before us and I can just make out more of the glass panels. They must be the cells. Picking up our pace, we make our way to the one that corresponds with Omar’s cell number, D-17. We stop in front of the glass panel and a red light, from a black box on the ceiling, blinks to green. The color of the glass slowly changes, the black fading, until the glass is transparent.
“It’s automated,” I say to Jasper, who seems just as bewildered as me.
Behind the glass is a small gray room, complete with a low-hanging bed attached to the wall with a couple of chains, a chair and a metal desk on the opposite side, and in the back corner what I assume is a toilet. Omar is sitting on the bed, his back pressed against the wall, his knees to his chest. As the glass finally finishes transforming he looks up, anger and fear twisting his bruised and swollen features.
I step forward and place a hand on the glass.
“Oh my moon gods. What did they do to you?”
“Cuz,” he says, his voice hoarse, “what are you doing here?”
“Your face,” I say, unable to ignore the crusted blood under his lip, the purple and yellow protrusion around his eye.
He lifts a couple fingers and touches the bruise gingerly. “Oh this. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“You’re right.” He nods into his knees. “They busted me up pretty good. Just the price of doing business I suppose.”
“That’s not okay.”
“Oh yeah, what’s he got to say about it?” He lifts his head at Jasper, who has remained a couple of steps behind me, lingering in the shadows.
“He didn’t know, otherwise we wouldn’t have let them do this to you.” I turn and gesture for Jasper to step forward. “Right?”
He doesn’t move, but the look on his face says it all. He’s horrified.
“This is unacceptable,” he says, or chokes is more like it. “I will make sure the wolves who did this are suitably reprimanded.”
Omar lifts his brow. “Sure, sure.” He returns his gaze to me. “What are you doing here anyhow?”
“I wanted to—to see you and make sure you’re okay and…” Suddenly, in the face of Omar’s brutalization and this rank excuse for a holding facility, the idea of asking Omar to explain himself seems ridiculous. No one, especially him, deserves to be treated this way.
“And to see why I did it?” he finishes the thought for me.
I press my other hand on the glass, wishing there wasn’t this barrier between us.
“If you tell us we might be able to help you. Right, Jasp?”
He crosses his arms, but nods.
Omar scoffs. “I told your hounds everything, already. Then they did this. What’s telling you going to help?”
“I don’t know, it just—it has to. Please, let us try?”
His head flops backward onto the wall like he’s thinking about it, then he turns and looks at me, studying my face. I try to convey just how serious I am, how badly I want to see him freed from this cell.
“Fine,” he huffs. Omar stands and comes to the glass. Up close his wounds look even worse. And there are more, on his arms and neck, I couldn’t see before. He’s wearing a white tank top and where the tattoo on his shoulder is exposed is a deep, nasty-looking gash, like someone slashed him with a blade. “What do you want to know?”
“Just start from the beginning,” I say. “Try to be detailed.”
Omar takes a deep breath. “Okay. It all started when my pack threw me out and my mate rejected me to stay. I was homeless, more or less, with no way to make money or to buy food. I spent a long time traveling, a long time. It’s easy to keep walking when you don’t know where you’re heading. I spent some time hunting on the prairies down south, living wild, you know? I thought maybe I could make a life like that but eventually food became too scarce and hard to find, and something, I don’t know if it was boredom or loneliness, made me leave. I went in search of other wolves.”
