Page 5

“Oh, have you now? And what did you see when you walked in here? Hmm?”

He was amused. So damned amused.

A little laughing man in a suit with a big-boy cigar.

“I saw a nice woman and a handsome gentleman who are lonely. I can hold you if you want. I can take away the loneliness.”

Keep them talking. Be sweet. Be the thing they want. All the lessons I’d learned from Lifetime movies of women getting kidnapped started flooding my brain with ideas. Maybe I could survive this. Maybe I could get free. Be sweet until I see an out and then take it.

A plan was forming, little bricks stacking themselves along the interior of my mind, as I tried to think my way through what was happening. Ignore the things that don’t make sense. Focus on the things that do. Focus on the things that seemed real. Maybe there was drugs on the door handle. Maybe that’s why I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

Mr. Ben snorted and pushed off the desk, stalking me until my back pressed against the wall. “Oh, dear Sóna, you are but a lost little girl in a world that you have no idea about. You will, though. Soon enough.”

A slimy, cold finger that didn’t match the look of his skin traced a line down my cheek, and the world went black.

Chapter 3

The blackness around me was soft and velvety. I wanted to nuzzle my face against it like a fat house cat, lavishing in its embrace.

The piercing pain that started behind my left eye and radiated out wouldn’t let me, though. It pulled me from the warm, soft depths back to a grey world filled with bitter cold and icy agony.

When I opened my eyes, I was sure I was still dreaming. Nothing made sense.

Nothing about the shapes around me seemed to flow and fit into place in a world I was familiar with. It was all disjointed, indecipherable edges that confused me. I recognized the bars of a cage but only on the most surface level. When I touched the blackened bar, it quivered like the thighs of a newly plucked virgin. It was not cold metal, not the unyielding force of a cage that belonged in my world. It was soft and plush, warm to the touch, and moved into my finger.

The chilling idea that I was inside of a living thing shot me to my feet, and I slammed my head against the low ceiling.

“Do be a dear and hold fucking still.”

Mr. Ben’s voice split the silence as he stepped into view. The face I saw before me was not the face he had worn in the small office. Gone was a smirking man in a well-tailored suit with a cigar, and in his place stood a creature with eyes too large for his head, pointed ears, and ash-grey skin with course black-as-night fur sprouting along a rat-like snout. His mouth was a hatchet slice into the flesh of an otherwise horror-laced image.

I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Not even the croaking whistle of primal terror.

His hatchet mouth stretched across pointed teeth into a barking laugh. “Am I not beautiful, darling?”

He pressed himself against the living bars and stroked it, causing my cage to tremble. I lurched back from the gnashing teeth of the creature before me, falling onto my ass. He snapped his long claw-tipped fingers, and the cage twisted, the bars moving to wrap around my arms and legs, my head dangling out from an opening.

“Now, let’s take a look at what we have here. Do be a dear and get her a change of clothing. She looks like a school marm. One of those gauzy numbers, I think,” he mumbled to someone I couldn’t see in the gloom of the space as he came around to appear in my upside-down view. “Eyes are too small. Boobs too. Ass too. Stomach as well. Legs too short. Let’s do something with this nest she calls hair, too. Do we know who will be at the Market tonight?”

I shuddered as his claw sank deep into my hair and lifted. He moved my head around as if inspecting a prized lamb. I tried to scream, tried to shout and call for help, but nothing came out. I struggled against the iron grip of the fuzzy-bars-turned-shackles but could not move.

“Our only confirmed clients are The Emerald Scythe and Lady Syphon.”

The voice sounded like that bitch that had greeted me at the That-Should-Not-Be-There house.

“Hrm. A small gathering this evening, then.” He turned his head to gaze down into my eyes. “Not good for you, I’m afraid. We will have to do significant work to ensure your sale. You don’t mind, right? Do speak up if you disagree with being reformed.”

I screamed in my mind, pushing the sound as hard as I could. I could feel myself straining into the words until, finally, I whispered out, “Fuck you.”

The large black depths of his eyes rounded at the hissing whisper, and he leaned in close to inspect me. “A better tongue lock, it seems, too. Willful little bitch, aren’t you?”

An unseen fist gripped my throat and squeezed, phantom fingers curling around my voice and clamping it down until I was choking on silence.

“As for fucking me, no thank you. I prefer my own kind. You humans are disgusting. Dripping all over the place, oozing with your own foulness.”

The hours stretching out before me were snapshots of abject horror. I watched, outside of my body, as Mr. Ben and his assistant butchered me. They carved and contorted my flesh like it was clay. Sculpting new features, exaggerating others. When blackness claimed me, I sank into it and prayed for it to never end. I gripped onto it with a desperation I hadn’t known before.

Pain had always been an unwelcome constant in my life. From beatings to hunger to loneliness so sharp it carved deep ravines in my psyche. I was not unfamiliar with its bite, an old familiar shoe as much as anything else. This was something else, though. The searing agony that seeped into my flesh and shattered my bones went so much further than anything I had ever known. It stabbed into the very essence of who I was, and when I thought I could take no more, when I thought that the next breath I took would be my last, the blackness would claim me, sure that I would wake no more.