whole lot of other people. I glanced around it now, seeing the gurney we’d been lying on. A weird kind of prison cell, it held a toilet, a shower, and a huge bed.
For mating in, I thought bitterly. Stuart and Hollingsworth’s words all started to filter into my head. What I’d heard when coming through, what they’d said to me, it started to make sense. Rob was right, this was a breeding facility, and for some reason, they needed me and some of Jai’s pack here.
“Janey…” I hissed, glancing around at the cages. The men within them were all pressed against the glass walls peering at us, but I didn’t see my friend.
“She’s not here,” Jai said with a definite shake of his head, “but they are.”
He moved away from me reluctantly, hands going to the glass walls. He felt along the joins and base, searching for signs of weakness. He did the same when he got to the back concrete wall and the shower cubicle. He tested the showerhead and the toilet before coming back to the gurney.
“Get inside the bathroom, Shan,” he said, his voice heavy and flat.
“What? Why…” He gripped the bottom edge of the mobile bed, lifting it off the ground.
“Don’t bother,” a voice said, my head jerking around to see where it came from.
“You’ll hurt yourself and her if you try,” said another.
“I told you to get out of Dodge, princess. Tell your man to stand down. Nothing breaks through this glass.”
“Get in the shower, Shan!” Jai snapped in response to it. I scuttled back as he lifted the thing, swinging it around like a hammer thrower would. He twisted his torso back and forth, back and forth and then SLAM! The bed went smashing into the glass. Jai paused for a moment, looking to see what damage he’d done, then slammed it against the glass again when he saw there was no difference.
SLAM!
“You wanna cool your jets. They’ll start pumping a sedative gas inside the cell if you don’t. You want to stay strong and alert for your mate, ready for what they’ll do next.”
SLAM!
“You’ll bring those bullyboys Hollingsworth employs down on you if you don’t stop.”
SLAM!
“They’re just as likely to take shit out on your mate to keep you compliant. They’ve done it before. They’re merciless and cruel and see us entirely as animals. We’re not worth even the slightest respect as sentient beings.”
SLAM!
Over the racket, I could hear the sound of boots clattering down the stairs at a rapid pace.
“They’ll take her from you and give her to one of us.”
The battered bed dropped to the floor, bent now into a twisted mess, and at just the right moment. Black clad men with bloody Diablo in tow came running down the steps, guns raised, red laser sights sweeping over the cages. What the hell they’d do with them against the glass walls, I didn’t know.
“Move to the left wall and put your hands upon the glass,” the leader said, putting down his gun and moving towards us. “Now!”
“And what are you going to do if I don’t, standing outside there?” Jai asked. “You come in here, you’re fucking dead.”
“Jai…” I said, reaching for him, the look on the man’s face scaring the shit out of me.
For good reason, it turned out. The man held up a small remote looking thing, thumbing the button with a sadistic grin before pressing down.
There was a theatre about this whole thing, I realised, and right now, I was at the bloody low point of it all. That man, fragile, stupid thing that he was, he was telling himself a story about this place, these people. I dropped to the ground as Jai did, struggling to stop his fall as his body twitched and convulsed. Tears made a mess of my vision, thankfully blurring the way the man brought my love low with such a tiny little movement. I struggled to hold him, his body thrashing with such violence. The man with the remote, he thought he had power, over me, over all of us, despite the fact that every single one of them was able to burst his head open like a watermelon.
“Enough!” I shrieked, my tears splattering onto Jai’s face. When I looked over at the man, he was little more than a black blur, and my face must have been a mask, of agony but I saw his grin. A crescent of white in all that mess, he just kept on smiling until someone