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“Who the fuck are you guys?” I ask the question aggressively.
A hand sweeps down swiftly out of the corner of my vision and catches me across the face hard enough to send me spinning back to the ground. My head sings with the blow, and an intense dizziness ensues that makes getting up impossible even if I wanted to.
“Meat doesn’t talk,” a rough voice intones. “Another word out of you and I’ll put you in the locker.”
I don’t know what that means, but for the moment I keep my mouth shut. That’s relatively easy because it’s full of blood. I swallow some and spit out the rest. I’m lucky my teeth are still intact.
They’re not answering questions, so I have to rely on what I can observe. First things first, unlike Avel’s loft, this is not a place that will be easily escaped. Looks like a one way in, one way out sort of deal. From my uncomfortable position on the floor, I scan the room, looking for weapons or some kind of exit route. I don’t see much of anything besides the limbs of my captors.
I think I recognize a couple of them. I think I’ve seen them before. But where? At the alpha’s place? No... Oh. I know. I saw them in the Hall of Bones. They were on the side behind Torin Rivet.
These saurians are criminals of the worst kind. Avel sort of implied that he treated Torin kindly and sent him to go work on a construction crew for his own good. I think he wanted that young man a long way from these brutes who not only hit women but beat on creatures less than half their size.
“You’re sure the Wings will come for this thing? It’s so pathetic. Not a single scale. She’s just flesh and bone. It’s disgusting.”
They start to discuss me as if I’m not present, and their discussion is not complimentary.
“She’s an easy set of holes. And Wings doesn’t like real saurian women. He’s practically celibate. Never seen him with a mate.”
“Thorn’s whole regime is turning into meat doll fuckers.”
Meat doll. That’s one grotesque way of describing me.
“We should cut her up, cook her, and put her in a stew for them. I know someone who works in the alpha’s kitchens. It would be funny to make them eat one of their fuck pets.”
A shiver runs through me. I am genuinely in danger of a kind I have not been in a long time. Usually, Sullivan gets me into situations like this. This time, I don’t know who to blame. It might very well be that just being someone who matters, even slightly, to someone powerful, is inherently dangerous.
“I wouldn’t fuck it.”
“Should we try?”
Being discussed in cool, terrible terms makes me afraid. And being afraid makes me furious. But my options are limited. I am surrounded by bigger, stronger creatures and I still don’t have a weapon.
One of them grabs me roughly by the back of the shirt, lifting me up from the ground in one arm. These things are just ridiculously powerful. They could tear me apart. When I look into this one’s red saurian gaze and see the unpleasant leer on his face, the scaling that goes from his temples all the way to his lips curling back with a dark thought, I get the sense that is exactly what they plan to do.
“It talks,” he says, swinging me around on the fulcrum of my shirt. “It talks, which means it can tell us how much it hurts when we hurt it. I think it might be fun to keep, and to hurt.”
I say nothing. I am putting all my energy into hating this saurian.
Then someone else says something that changes the energy of the conversation.
“We should show it to Wrath. It triggered the signal. Maybe he wants us to take it to him.”
“We’re not showing it to Wrath. We got it for ourselves. It’s ours.”
I don’t know who Wrath is, but the way the one holding me snaps back at the one who suggested it tells me this Wrath is someone they fear. I’m not being held by the highest ranking creatures of his particular saurian pack. This is someone’s half-cocked idea, and it is going to go sideways, like all half-cocked ideas that a crew without order comes up with.
I risk speaking again, though every time I do I get hurt worse than before.
“You should show me to Wrath, because when Avel finds me — and he will, you’re going to have brought an absolute shit show down on him, and if you somehow survive Avel, I doubt you’ll survive whoever Wrath is.”
The next thing I know I’m hitting the floor. Hard. The saurian who was holding me has dropped me like I suddenly turned red fucking hot.
Blood fills my mouth again. I feel something click inside my jaw. I think they might have broken a tooth. That’s the least of the damage they’ll do if they panic.
I can already predict their next stupid move…
“We need to get rid of her. And we need to get rid of that collar. It marks her as his.”
