Anger flashes behind my eyes, but when I see Mink’s secret in the flesh, I’m stunned into silence.

A woman. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

Her face hits me like lightning. She has icy blue eyes that shine brighter than anything else in the furnished room around her. Her dark blonde hair is long, past her shoulders, and even in the bad lighting, it seems to shine like a golden halo.

She’s a full foot shorter than me, and I recognize the look on her face. I know the sight of it well.

Fear.

We’re both frozen in place for a long moment, stunned at each other. Her eyes look me up and down. I’m wearing a tight black tank top and my usual black jeans. I loom in the doorway, my breathing heavy and my jaw tightening.

Until this morning, I thought the shed behind the house was just some storage space for old junk. I couldn’t have been more surprised when I stepped inside.

It was a surveillance room.

There were computers, camera setups, and video feeds all over the interior. It looked like a security guard’s room.

I saw what I thought was a recording of a girl walking around on the screens. I assumed it was some strange fetish porn the old man liked to watch.

Then I found the hatch in the floor.

When I opened the thing up, I felt like I’d found a staircase to the underworld. It was a long staircase into darkness, and the light bulb I turned on flickered and revealed cobwebs most of the way down.

Then a military grade door, keeping whatever was locked inside a secret from the outside world. Mink had kept his secret well, and no one would have been able to find her should he have lived. He was careful, and in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by concrete and steel, no one would have heard her scream for help.

She was his prisoner, but I have no idea for how long. Pity swarms my heart, and it brings a bitter taste to my mouth. I shove it all down, anger rising up in me once more.

I have a living, breathing problem on my hands. One I can’t simply murder and run away from. I might be the Angel of Death, but I do not kill children or women. That was one of the reasons why all my mafia contacts are dancing with the Devil, now.

So what can I do with a lovely, broken captive that I’ve inherited?

I take a few steps into the room, and as soon as I do, she starts running toward me at full tilt. I’m taken by surprise, and she tries to run past me out the door, scrambling like a wild animal.

I catch her around the waist and pull her back. Immediately, she starts kicking and scratching at me, a can of tomato soup smashing against my bicep before slipping from her hands and denting on impact. She doesn’t try to lunge for it, instead battering her little fists off my rippling muscles like rain as I hold her back and grip her wrists as she struggles.

I don’t want to hurt her, but she’s going to hurt herself like this.

“Get the fuck off me, let me go!” she cries, thrashing in my arms.

“Calm down,” I grunt, “I’m not going to hurt—”

“Fuck off!” she shouts, trying to lean around me and shout, “Help! Help!” up the stairs.

“I’m not going to hurt you!” I say in a firm, commanding voice as I pull her off me and pin her arms to her side, holding her away from me and looking into her terrified face. “Listen to me. What are you doing down here?”

She breathes heavily a few seconds, watching me with wild eyes as her chest rises and falls, color flush in her cheeks.

Her gaze goes to my hands, then to my chest. The anger in her face starts to fade, and it slowly gives way to something else. Something I’m more used to seeing when people look at me.

Fear.

“You’re... you’re not him,” she says at last, more to herself than to me.

“No. I’m not him.”

“Your grip is different. You’re way too big,” she says, talking to herself. “And the smell, too. You’re not him. Are you... did that bastard send you to kill me?”

“No. I’m not here to kill you.”

I look her in the eye, and I see a hundred emotions in that intense expression. She’s anxious, terrified, confused, and still a little angry, but there’s something else in that gaze.

How long has it been since she’s seen another person? Longing lingers beneath her heavy lashes, and that’s confusing to me. Concerning. But perhaps I can use that to my advantage. If she’s been down here this long, if she’s desperate for anyone but Mink to visit her...

“Let me prove that I’m not here to hurt you. I’m going to let you go. Do not try to run. I’m not him, but you’re still in the middle of nowhere with me, and the quicker we can work this out, the better it will be for both of us.”

She looks up at me with defiance at first, but I can see the conflict in her eyes. There’s desperation there, too.

Finally, she relents, and I release her arms, my eyes narrowing critically at her.

She rubs her arms and immediately backs away from me and moves to her bed. It’s a rickety-looking thing, but the way she moves to it makes it seem like it’s the one thing in the room that brings her any comfort. She sits down on it, her posture closing up, and her hands grab handfuls of her blanket.

My eyes move from it to the bathroom area. There are no walls, and the shower has no curtain. I clench my jaw, thinking back to all the camera feeds set up in the room above us. All of them showed a room... this room.

Mink was watching her every move.

She was his sick little perverted game.

“What are you doing here? Do you work for him?” she asks, her voice still suspicious, but her eyes keep moving up and down me.

“No,” I say simply, taking another step into the room. “Who’s this ‘him’ you keep talking about?” I already know, of course, but if Mink had friends, or someone else who knew of this woman, things could get messy very quickly.

“I... I don’t know,” she says, her lip quivering. “The guy who put me here.”

I think carefully about how to approach this. Judging by this woman’s mental state, she has probably been down here a while. I’ve met soldiers of the mafia who have spent long spans of time in solitary confinement with no other human contact.

It can have serious effects on their psyches. And those were hardened criminals, men who knew why they were in solitary. She’s desperate for answers, and very fragile. She didn’t have the training those men had, didn’t have the constitution.

I take another step into the room. She watches me carefully, but she doesn’t move.

“Do you know how long you’ve been down here?”

She seems to try to think for a moment, but she swallows and shakes her head. “There are no windows and no clocks.” Her eyes are rimmed with tears. “It... it feels like a lifetime.”

“You said someone put you here,” I say. “Were you taken against your will?”

“Do I look like I want to be here?” she snaps, but she immediately softens, and I see tears roll down her cheeks as she buries her face in her hands, sobbing.

I stiffen, watching her, unsure what to do. I haven’t had contact with another person since killing the previous owner, and I’d never been one for the company of others. Especially when they were... vulnerable.

For a brief second, I think back to a brief moment in my past, the last time I saw a woman cry. I was only a child then, but it was in that second I knew that women were special. Something to be protected and guarded against the hurt in the world.

And then I became the hurt in the world.

Is this a chance to make amends for all the hearts I broke? All the husbands and fathers I took from the world?

Slowly, I walk toward her, and once I’m close enough to her bed, I kneel down in front of her to look at her on her level. She gasps in surprise when she realizes how quickly and quietly I approached her, and she recoils a little, but she doesn’t run.

She just stares at me with those wet, blue eyes.

She probably still thinks this is some kind of dream. Some horrible, hopeful fever dream.

“Do you want to come out of here?” I ask her, trying to keep my gravelly voice soft.

It seems like a question with an obvious answer, but one glance around the room says so much. There are signs of her living in it everywhere. With no human contact, no view of the outside world, this place has been her whole world for god knows how long.

She looks at me with foggy eyes, as if I’d just spoken a foreign language to her.

I hold out my hand to her, and she stares at it for a few moments before carefully putting her small hand in my palm.

She seems almost surprised that my hand feels real. Despite everything, she feels warm and soft.

I close my hand around hers and stand up slowly.

“I don’t even know where I am,” she breathes, her voice so delicate.

“Let me show you,” I say. “Trust me for a moment.”

After a pause, she nods.

I take a few slow steps backward until we reach the threshold of the door. She looks at it cautiously, as if wondering if this is a trap.

Finally, she walks over it with me, and she squints up at the stairway to the exit before I gently guide her up.

As we climb the stairs carefully, one thought haunts my mind.

Who is this angel I’ve found down here in the bowels of hell? And what am I going to do with her now that she’s seen my face?