of greasy meat and mostly onions on the grease-stained floor. He doesn’t move on to the next cage but watches me like he did the female beast. And then he fills the plate again and adds a second helping to my first.
“You eat up,” he whispers with a wink. My lower lip trembles, and my eyes fill with tears. This man is showing me compassion. I try to smile at him, but then he says, “I bet honey on you. Don’t make me regret it!” My smile turns to a frown.
He stands and pushes the squeaky cart to the male beside me, and I look into the cage. The male beast isn’t paying attention to his dinner. His face is pressed against the bars as if he’s finally noticed someone is in the cage beside him. I meet his unblinking eyes—eyes I have known my entire life—and gasp.
The memory of pain burns down my back, fire beneath my skin, and Bowen’s words come back to me.
“You have scars from here to here.” He trailed his fingers down my entire back. “They look like they’re from fingernails.”
The walls were white tile, and light glared from them.
A man with thick white hair put his face in front of mine and looked right into my eyes. “You’re only going to feel a little prick, and then everything will fade. You’ll be at peace.” He wore a white doctor’s coat with a name tag clipped to it—Doctor Page.
I lay on my stomach. Thick leather straps held my naked body against a cold metal table. Straps that ground into my ankles, the backs of my knees, my bare hips, my lower back, my shoulders, even across my head. Jonah was in the room, too, right in my line of sight. Sedated, naked, and strapped to a stainless-steel table just like mine. Drool dripped from his slack mouth and pooled beneath his cheek.
“I don’t want this!” I yelled. The metal clung to my sweaty cheek, making it hard to talk. The strap on my forehead made it impossible to see what was going on behind me, but I could hear people moving around—the doctor and someone else.
“You may not want this, but your mother does. She is your legal guardian. Her decision outweighs your wants. She’s doing it in the hopes that you’ll survive long enough for us to find a cure,” Dr. Page said from behind me. “It’s what’s best, Fiona.” He walked around to where I could see him again, tilted his head to the side, and peered right into my face. A shadow of doubt flashed in his gray eyes, filling my entire body with panic. “You’re much too sweet to give up on.”
I snarled and lunged for him, making my table-bed lurch, yet I hardly moved beneath the leather straps. The doctor jumped away from me and frowned.
“Jonah,” I cried. “Help me!” But he didn’t stir. Didn’t even close his mouth.
“Needle, nurse. The sooner we sedate her, the sooner we can induce the coma.” The doctor held out his latex-gloved hand, and a hefty syringe was placed into it. “I’m going to inject this directly into your spinal tissue, and then you’ll go to sleep. It will only hurt for a minute—a little pressure in your spine—and then everything will go numb,” he said to me.
I looked at the needle, twice as long as my index finger, and screamed. The doctor stepped up to me and put his icy, latex-gloved hand on my naked back, pressing it against my spine. Something pricked my skin, like the sting of a bee, and then pressure built around my spine, hot and white, as if the needle were forcing its way between my vertebrae, wedging them apart. I screamed again and lurched, fighting against my restraints, making the needle dig against bone.
“No!” I shrieked. As if he could finally hear me, Jonah’s eyes fluttered open and locked on mine, his massive pupils instantly shrinking. “Help me, please,” I whimpered to him. My legs were going numb, a warm tingling sensation spreading from my thighs to my knees to my feet. I couldn’t feel the table beneath them, couldn’t feel the metal’s coldness seeping into my skin.
“Jonah,” I cried. “Get me out of here.”
His eyes, so wild, so foreign, seemed to clear for a moment as they focused on mine, as if there was a piece of him left inside. And then he grunted, long and low. A vein in his forehead popped to the surface.