Delilah
When Pagano brought my breakfast, he had to open the door, because my milk carton wouldn’t fit under it.
“I need to talk to Vandekamp.” I had to know how I got pregnant. I had to look into his eyes while I demanded information, so I could see the truth and hopefully rule him out as a suspect.
I needed to know why he’d locked me away from everyone else and put me on a prenatal health food diet, and what all of that meant for the fate of the baby I shouldn’t even be carrying.
I needed to shove my thumbs into his eye sockets and listen to him scream.
“That’s not a request you get to make.” Pagano pushed my breakfast into my room, then picked up the snack tray I’d slid into the hall untouched in the middle of the night. He frowned at the browning apple as he started to close the door to my cell.
“Wait. Please. Just tell him I want to talk.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“If you don’t let me talk to him, I won’t eat a bite of this.”
Pagano shrugged. “Do what you’ve got to do.” But the tight line of his jaw said something else entirely. If he’d been instructed to make sure I took my vitamin, he was probably also supposed to make sure I ate.
I picked up the tray he’d slid into my room and held it over the toilet, tilting it so that the blueberries would have tumbled from their compartment, if not for the plastic wrap. “How much trouble are you going to be in if I flush this?”
He gave me an exasperated sigh. “Yes, you’ll get me in trouble. But you’ll also lose your work privileges.”
I retracted my breakfast tray, surprised by the news. “Why didn’t I have work privileges yesterday?”
Pagano frowned. “Yesterday you had an engagement.” At the arena, of course.
“So, if I play nice, I get to work this afternoon? Outside my cell? Where I’ll see other people?”
My handler’s frown deepened. “What’s wrong with you?” His gaze narrowed on me. “Should I call the infirmary?”
“I’m fine.” I sank onto my stack of mats with my tray. “Close the door on your way out.”
He frowned at me for several more seconds, then left.
When his footsteps receded down the hall, I peeled the plastic wrap from my breakfast tray. The scents of the sausage and egg-white omelet sent me lurching for the toilet, but heaving for several minutes produced nothing more than the water I’d drunk an hour earlier.
Only the fact that I’d never been pregnant—and hadn’t known it was a possibility—could have led me to mistake morning sickness for a side effect of sedation.
When the nausea finally passed, I sat on the floor by the toilet for several more minutes, staring at my breakfast as if it had betrayed me. Then I scooped the omelet into the toilet and flushed it out of my life. I ate the fruit and the biscuit, then washed the vitamin down with my carton of milk. Then I brushed my teeth, ran my hands through my hair and sat on my stacked sleep mats and stared at the door, waiting for it to open.
With no way to measure time, I couldn’t be sure how much of it passed before Pagano finally came back, but the interval felt like eternity. I was up and ready to go before he got my door open.
Pagano walked me from my own isolated building to the dormitory kitchen, where two men in plain white aprons were cooking, while a staff of four filled trays according to the specifications listed on the charts hanging above a prep table.
Mahsa and Simra were among the women loading carts with prepared trays. They both smiled and nodded, unsurprised to see me in what was evidently our normal routine. But when I headed for the empty cart next to theirs, Pagano grabbed my arm and redirected me with a frown. He hadn’t yet figured out that I was missing memories, but he couldn’t be far off the conclusion.
To my utter shock, Mahsa and Simra each left pushing a cart full of trays unattended. I couldn’t understand that until I heard a handler warn them at the kitchen doorway that they had exactly fifteen minutes to complete their rounds and return the carts, before they would be paralyzed on the spot and collected by their handlers. That knowledge, along with the fact that their collars kept them from leaving the building or passing through any unauthorized doorway seemed to satisfy the staff that this was a perfectly safe arrangement.
Evidently the collars were equipped with locators, as I’d suspected.
The cart my handler led me to was being loaded with trays of gooey lasagna, aromatic garlic bread and a fresh spinach-and-cherry-tomato salad drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette. Unless Vandekamp was hiding another two dozen pregnant women, my best guess was that I would be delivering lunch trays to the guards, rather than to my fellow captives.
Pagano escorted me around the building, where I delivered the first few lunches to guards assigned to monitor the dormitories. They were all men. Every time I handed one of them a tray, I held my breath and looked right into his eyes, both hoping for and dreading the possibility of finding some private kind of recognition in them. Some cruel knowledge.
Would I be able to tell, if I were looking at the father of my child? Did I truly want to know, if there was nothing I could do about it?
After the dormitory, Pagano led me to the main building, where he knocked on a door labeled Security, and I gave a tray apiece to two men watching a huge bank of wall-mounted monitors. I tried not to be too obvious as I glanced at a tall shelf stacked with boxes identical to the one my collar had come in.
Were those extras, waiting to be programmed for new arrivals?
Was the security room also ground central for collar programming?
Pagano pulled me from the room before I’d learned anything useful, and I followed him back through the topiary and another iron gate, then into an unfamiliar building he called “the stable.”
Inside, I found a small foyer joining two hallways.
“Are you good from here?” my handler asked, as he pointed his remote at me and pressed a button. I blinked at him in confusion. “You remember where you’re going?” he clarified, and I noticed that Olive Burnett, the arena event coordinator, was hovering in the doorway, waiting to claim his full attention. He rolled his eyes at me in exasperation. “There are only two hallways, Delilah.”
“Yeah.” I glanced from Pagano to Burnette, then back. Evidently this was our regular arrangement. “I got it.”
I couldn’t leave the building, but I would get no better chance to snoop on my own.
I turned down the left-hand hallway and knocked on the first door, encouraged by the fact that I wasn’t paralyzed or driven to my knees with pain by the proximity sensor in my collar.
“Yeah?” a guard said as he opened the door. His gaze brightened when it fell on my cart. “Great. We’re starving.”
I gave him two trays while I stared over his shoulder at a room lined with sterile white-tiled horse stalls, each occupied by a centaur or satyr. The centaurs each had room for only a couple of steps forward or backward, and they couldn’t turn around at all in the cramped space.
My heart ached for them.
I recognized three of the centaurs and four of the satyrs from Metzger’s, but they did not smile when they saw me. Their glazed gazes held nothing but fear, and just the sight of their misery made the furiae stir deep inside me.
But before my inner beast could get me in trouble, the handler closed the door in my face.
I distributed trays to three more rooms, then I knocked on the last door in the left-hand hallway. “Come in,” a woman’s voice called.
I opened the door to see a female handler holding an electric rotary file—it looked like an electric toothbrush, with a rough metal cylinder in place of the bristle head. Strapped to the table in front of her was an adolescent feline shifter I’d never seen before. That I could remember. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was deep enough to indicate sedation, rather than true sleep.
“Just set the trays over there.” The handler hardly glanced at me as she pulled the poor girl’s mouth open and began filing the points of her sharp canines.
I had to force myself to look away.
The back of the room—just like the four before it—was lined with built-in cages, each of which contained a single young shifter. I counted three boys and two girls. The last pen on the left stood open, waiting for the girl on the table to return.
I set two trays on the desk the handler had pointed at, and as I was heading back into the hall, my gaze caught on a familiar set of golden wolf eyes and long, tangled blond hair in one of the pens. “Genni!” I whispered, glad that the handler couldn’t hear me over the grinding sound of her electric file.
But Genevieve heard me just fine; a werewolf’s hearing is much better than any human’s.
“What are you doing here?” I threaded my fingers through the mesh front of her cage, amazed that the guard had so much confidence in my collar that she hadn’t even glanced up from her work. How long had I been serving her lunch?
“Where else would I be?” Genni whispered in her distinctive French accent, and I realized I shouldn’t be surprised to see her.
Right before our coup, she’d been sold to the All American Menagerie. Gallagher and I had tried to buy her back as soon as we took over, but All American had already sold her because they couldn’t make her perform and she’d been too feral to breed.
Her father, Claudio, had been devastated. He’d left the menagerie to look for her.
Genni looked thin, yet much healthier than she’d ever been in the menagerie. But she and the other young shifters were pale, as if they rarely saw the sun.
“Did you bring me quelque chose?” Genni asked, her gaze wandering to the trays I’d delivered.
“Um...sure. Just a sec.” I glanced at the handler, to make sure she was still busy, then I snatched the garlic bread from both trays and slid it through the tray slot of Geni’s cage, into her eager hands. “Eat fast.”
Yet as soon as I’d given her the food, I felt guilty. Five other pairs of wide eyes watched our interaction, and I couldn’t tell whether they were more hungry for food or for kindness. But I had nothing else to give.
“Merci. Have you figured out les colliers yet?” Genni whispered around a mouth full of bread. “How to...” she hesitated while she searched for the word “...turn them off?”
My eyes widened. I’d been trying to turn the collars off? All of them? Was that possible? Had I figured it out?
Could Vandekamp have erased my memory to take that knowledge from me?
“Hey! You know better, Delilah,” a voice called out from behind me. Startled, I whirled around to see a second guard standing in the doorway. “Get moving.”
I turned to give Genni an apologetic look, but she had her back to me, no doubt trying to eat the rest of her bread before the guard saw.
As I pushed my cart toward the next hallway, the guard glanced at his lunch tray in disgust.
“What? No garlic bread today?”