Chapter 2

Answers didn’t wait long to find Alessia. She measured their time there with the meals they were given. Twice a day, so she figured it must be a morning and night offer of whatever grubby, disgusting food they threw into their cell. At first, she didn’t want any part of it, but Drake insisted that it wasn’t poisoned—he’d tested that theory already. Besides, he said, if they wanted to kill us, we would have never made it to the jail cell anyway.

He had a point. And Alessia didn’t realize how badly she was starving until the stale bread was in her mouth and making its way down to fill the void in her stomach. It didn’t do much to fix it completely, but it was a start and the grumbles calmed down.

She counted two rounds of these feedings, two days, before they saw another human. She wasn’t someone Alessia recognized. She was tall and muscular and had intimidating dragon tattoos running down her arm. Alessia didn’t need more hints than that to know she was looking at another dragon shifter.

“Looking good as always, Tekkin,” the woman said, nodding to him. “You’ve got yourself a little cellmate. We have bets going to see how long it takes you two to just lose it and fuck each other. You survive through tomorrow night and Jared and Troy lose, so keep it up.”

Alessia felt her face flush and she looked down. She didn’t want to seem so easily riled, so easily weakened in front of these people. But she was tired, her body ached from the beating it had taken and now the hard floor she slept on. She was quickly losing any sense of pride to keep feelings of inadequacy at bay.

“Did I make you shy?” the woman asked with an over-exaggerated fake pout. She was talking to Alessia now. “It’s okay. We’re all adults here. It would be far from the most scandalous thing that’s happened here.”

“What do you want, Lana?” Drake snapped.

“I’m here for your little bedfellow,” she said. “She’s up for questioning.”

“Then you’re taking me with you.”

“You had your chance to give orders, Drake; it’s over now. You stay put or we give you a reason to do so.”

“Try me.”

The energy in the room changed. She wondered if it was just her imagination making it feel as though the heat in the room raised. She could see what she thought was the ripple of the heated air coming off the ground. She was terrified.

“I’ll go with you,” she said, quickly, standing and exerting virtually all the energy she had left. She stumbled a bit and Drake moved to catch her but she pushed him away. She couldn’t afford him losing his temper and something terrible happening.

“Smart girl,” the woman, Lana, said and the tenseness of her stance was gone suddenly. Drake, however, was still poised to strike like an overzealous attack dog.

She moved to unlock the door and swung the cell open. She stepped in. There was a three-second pause where it seemed everything would be fine. There was always a three-second pause for things like this. It always seemed like life teetered on a perilous three seconds’ worth of decision making before something terrible or wonderful happened. It was that way at birthday parties or graduations. Unfortunately, it was in these three seconds that Drake decided to do something incredibly stupid.

He lunged at Lana. Alessia didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish once he had her on the ground. But it didn’t even go that far. She moved in first, perhaps sensing it or maybe seeing the slight shift in weight before he moved. Alessia heard once that shifters had better reflexes than normal humans. And Lana wasn’t the starved and exhausted one kept in a cell. So, the elements were on her side and she dropped Drake into the ground, hard.

She, unfortunately, didn’t stop there. She pulled out a small device and pressed it into his back. Alessia heard the familiar click and the spark of a taser.

“Stop!” she shouted and she was the one lunging at Lana now, before she realized it. But, like before, she was very quickly disposed of, dropped to the ground as the sounds of clicking stopped.

“You two have far too much energy,” she said, stowing the weapon. “Maybe we should run you a little ragged to get you tired at the end of the day. Or maybe feed you less.”

She moved forward and yanked Alessia up to her feet by a tight grip on her bicep. She pulled so hard that Alessia was worried, for a brief moment, that her arm might pull right from the socket and that would be that. During her time as an undergraduate student, she learned all about how the Russian tsars would implement dislocation of joints and forced replacement as a form of torture leading to execution. She shivered at the idea.

“Come on, princess,” Lana said. “Time to break the ice with some friends.”

Lana’s grip stayed on her arm so hard that she was sure it would bruise by morning. Behind them, Drake stayed groaning on the ground as she locked the cell behind them and they moved down the hall to parts she hadn’t yet seen of her strange prison.

**

They didn’t blindfold her because this place was far too complicated for her to ever keep track of how many turns they took and how many small flights of stairs they’d taken on. Several pairs of eyes brushed over her as she moved through the halls and Lana kept directing her where to go. But none of these eyes were friendly and none of them were Diego or Erik. She wanted to ask where they were, if they were alive, if they were even here. But she doubted she’d get an answer.

“Saved a seat, just for you,” Lana said as they turned a corner into a room and she was dropped into a metal folding chair, banging her elbow in the process.

“Thanks,” she said dryly and Lana smirked at her.

“We’ve got some more people on their way in, but feel free to get comfortable; you’ll be here for a while.”

Lana left her in the room and Alessia knew better than to think there was a way to simply walk out and escape this place. She had yet to see any cameras but she had no doubt that she was being watched. So she sat there, making her back as straight as possible and opening her eyes as wide as they could be. She was tired, she was in pain, but she wouldn’t let them know that. If it was mental warfare, that was one thing she was certain she’d be better at.

The room had nothing to give it away, no decorations, no writings, nothing but this chair and a few more folding metal chairs across the room from her. She knew an interrogation room when she saw one. Though she never imagined herself inside one and never imagined it taking place in this steampunk dungeon of a place they kept her.

Shifter politics only got on the news when it was shifters attacking nons. She had never even considered looking at the politics of shifters against each other. She had a feeling this group wasn’t the same one Diego had once belonged to. At least she desperately hoped it wasn’t that same one. She wasn’t even sure it was the same group that Drake had been in that day they kidnapped her.

How many factions were vying for some kind of power here? And which one had she landed herself in the hands of?

She swallowed and stared at a hole in the wall. She wouldn’t be frightened. She wouldn’t let them get to her. Her mind was a steel case, a locked safe. She wouldn’t let them break her for the tears and begging they would barter in. She had no information. They must have known that by now. This was all about tricking her into begging for her life while they may have already made the decision to kill her.

She went pale. She felt her stomach drop. But she wouldn’t show it.

**

She had no idea how long she’d been in the room before the door behind her burst open and Lana was back. This time with Erik under her tight grip and a man Alessia had never seen before walking in behind them.

Erik looked incredibly worse for wear. One of his eyes seemed to be healing and several cuts were strewn across his face, still gooey with blood that hadn’t quite set in as a scab yet. He looked more tired than Alessia felt and barely stood on his own. A new bruise would be added to his body as Alessia stared at Lana’s grip on him just before she shoved him forward. Alessia didn’t have enough time to try to catch him and he clattered to the ground in a heap of limbs trying to break his fall.

“There, now we’re all here,” she said. “I’ll be outside.”

The last part had been said to the man who came in the room with her. He was tall, broad shouldered, generally the intimidating military type. He was definitely an ex-Marine or ex-soldier at least. Maybe he’d been discharged during the time when shifters weren’t allowed to openly serve in the military. Either way, he looked like he knew his way a little too well around an interrogation room and torture chamber. Somehow, Alessia found herself immediately missing the familiarity of Lana.

“My name is James,” he said. “Not so scary, right?”

Alessia hated being talked to like a child. This man would try to good cop them, maybe even bad cop them too. She stayed stoic. She stared at the wall. She had no information worth divulging; it wasn’t like she was trying to hide some grand scheme or was protecting others out there in some secret organization. She was very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she wasn’t about to beg for her life to anyone.

“Do you two have names?” he asked, pulling up another chair and sitting down in front of them.

Alessia didn’t answer and it didn’t seem like Erik had the ability. James bounced his head between the two of them, watching closely as neither answered and Alessia hardened her face even more.

“Right,” he said. “Look. You were the ones trespassing on us.”

“It was an abandoned building,” Alessia snapped before she could stop herself.

“She speaks,” he said with a smile that felt sour. “Yes well, we owned that block of abandoned building you’re referring to. Did you forget that just because no one actively lives there, it doesn’t mean someone doesn’t own it?”

“You attacked and kidnapped us,” she said.

“We did. Am I meant to feel guilty for that?”

“That’s false imprisonment.”

“Unless we were within our rights since you were, as I mentioned, trespassing.”

“Just ask us what you want and let us go.”

“I did ask, your names?”

Something about giving someone her name seemed to make an entire situation feel a lot more vulnerable. When someone had her name, they had power over her. It was that way in stories and fairy tales. She couldn’t give him her name because then he would use it, turn it into something weak or something it wasn’t. He would use it to try to break her. So, she kept her mouth shut in a tight line.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, there are a few ways we could do this.”

He stood with a sigh, went to the corner of the room, and pulled out a box that had been hiding in the darkness. He came back with a small file in his hand, metal and black. He walked over to Erik who seemed to barely register where he was, his head lulled to one side. James knelt down in front of him and tapped on his cheek with force, but not enough to be considered a slap.

“Hey there, pal,” he said. “I can see you’re not really in a state to talk, which is fine with me. But your friend here is and she’s refusing. So, I’m going to have to get her to talk somehow. Since you’re pretty helpless right now, you, unfortunately, drew the short straw here.”

He pulled Erik’s hand out and lined the file up with his index finger, where the nail met the skin. Alessia realized what he was planning to do just seconds too late. Erik let out a yell that seemed to wake him from his daze, just a bit. Blood immediately flowed from where the file was buried, dripping down to the floor so much louder than Alessia would have thought possible.

“No!” she yelled. “Please. Okay. My name is Alessia.”

“Last name?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Monroe. Alessia Monroe.”

“There, wasn’t so hard, right? Six syllables, maybe five seconds out of your life,” he said, pulling the torture device back. Erik yelped even then and immediately cradled his wounded hand against his chest. “And his name?”

“Erik. Roberts,” she said.

“Excellent.”

He stepped away and wiped the bloodied instrument on his pants. He tossed it back into the box and she wondered how many other people had been victims of it and what the chances were that Erik would get some sort of infection as a result. That was an issue for later.

“You have given me a lot to think about,” he said. “So, we’ll call it a day.”

“Really?” Alessia said.

“You want to go some more?”

No. She didn’t. But she’d been dragged from her cell. Drake had been tasered to the ground. Erik had very nearly been tortured. Just so they could learn their names. She wouldn’t complain about being let go for the night, but she was more than a little worried about what it all meant.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, reading her emotions on her face. “We’ll let you get cozy back in your cells and try this all again tomorrow.”

As if on cue, Lana appeared and had her hands on Alessia, yanking her up. Someone else grabbed Erik and dragged him out the door. Alessia looked after him, wanting to call out, to let him know she was there, she wasn’t far, she was thinking of him, she’d figure this out. But nothing came out as her mouth hung open and watched after him being dragged away.

“Maybe we should room you with him and get a new bet going, huh?” Lana said a little too intimately in her ear. “Does a guy being wounded really do it for you?”

“Fuck off.”

“So she does have teeth,” Lana chuckled next to her. “They’re pretty dull, but what else do you expect from a non? It’s a start. Maybe we’ll make something dangerous out of you yet, huh?”

Alessia kept her mouth shut but glared in front of her. She wanted to avoid the way Lana shoved her down the hall but she didn’t know the way back. Besides, she’d probably find herself on the ground, just the same as Drake if she tried that. So she settled for glaring and keeping her body stiff as she walked through the halls and took the turns she was directed to take.

“Home sweet home,” Lana said when they returned to the room with the cell.

The door opened with an ear-bursting groan at the hinge and Alessia was tossed inside once more. Drake had managed to pick himself up, now sitting against the wall. He still seemed to be in a fair bit of pain, but his eyes opened at the sound and found Alessia. He shifted towards her, his face instantly full of concern.

“I’m okay,” she promised in a whisper.

“Cute,” Lana said. “I’ll be back later to check on you two. Have fun.”

“Where’d they take you?” he asked. “Did they do anything? You’re not hurt?”

Alessia shook her head. “They just asked me and Erik our names. They’ve beat him up badly though. He needs help.”

Drake looked grim, nodding and sighing as he turned to look off into the air, in thought.

“Are you okay?” Alessia asked, letting her fingers travel across his skin along the jaw and into his hairline. He leaned into the touch.

“Better now,” he said. “Is that too cliché?”

She snorted. “For anywhere outside a jail cell, absolutely.”

“Try not to hold it over me then when we get free.”

The when in his sentence seemed so out of place. It was hard for Alessia to convince herself there was a future where she would see daylight again, go to the movies, or out to eat. She’d only been down here for a few days and already she felt like she’d been a prisoner for years. Jail cells and cabin fever had that interesting effect on the psyche.

“We will get out,” Drake said, reading her thoughts and squeezing her hands into his own. “That I promise you.”

And despite everything she’d been through and all the circumstances surrounding them, she believed him. More fool me, she thought.