Page 164 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

‘It’s all I’ve ever known.’

‘Well, I’m just gonna have to prove you wrong.’

Troy leaves.

Riley flops down on the bed, eyes closed. ‘Good luck.’

✴

Another year slips by like a fever-dream headache.

Nothing to mark it. Nothing to hold on to. Nothing good.

Nothing especially bad.

Just… time passing like a prison sentence, only it’s not the room or the doors or even the chains he still uses three times a year.

It’s his body.

It’s these bones.

This skin. These stupid fucking cells that love him the wrong way, the panicked way, the scared way.

This thing inside him.

He locks it up, throws away the key.

He will be the tower. An ugly, windowless room.

A year goes by, and then, when he’s twenty-two, everything changes.

✴

It’s four in the morning and something is happening.

Riley senses it despite not wanting to, wishes he could gut his stupid senses and rip them out, but he can’t.

Even through a steel door, he can feel something is going on below.

The hustle of urgency. Gunpowder.

He gets a new scent, is instantly fascinated despite himself, goes downstairs to the door and sniffs what meagre air comes through. His senses can’t arrange the data in any way outside of a basic Neanderthal sketch: child.

There’s a small child somewhere in this place.

And someone else too, someone whose base scent makes Riley frown deeply, memory tugging from within, but he can’t name it, can’t place it.

For the first time in years, he wants to get out.

Riley bangs on the door.

He yells. He calls out. It’s not Troy who comes, it’s one of his men.

There’s a loud thud on the door from the other side.

‘Keep it down, psycho!’

‘Is there a… a kid here?’ Riley asks, his voice breaking, so terrified that some poor innocent child will have to go through what he did, be locked up forever, beaten, force-fed, imprisoned, no.