Of Moons and Monsters - Willow Hadley Page 0,16

Fucking asshole. He watches me for a few more seconds before shaking his head and mumbling something under his breath, and quickly opens the tiny slot of our cage to slip in our daily meals. I laugh when I notice the trembling in his hands, and that scares him enough that he almost drops the tray. He slams the slot closed and glares at me, but he doesn’t say anything else before moving onto the next cage.

I wait until he’s a few cages down before crawling forward to grab our food. I lift the lid on one of the bowls and frown angrily when I find a decent-sized portion of rice, chicken, and green beans. It honestly infuriates me that they feed us well when our living conditions are otherwise fucking unbearable.

I’ve been here for four days now. Four long, cold, miserably agonizing days. The first two days, I refused to eat because I figured they probably drugged the food. But yesterday, Giovanni—the demon in charge of this disgusting operation—ordered the guards to hold me down and force me to eat. They kept me restrained for most of the day just to make sure I wouldn’t purposely throw it all up.

The food isn’t drugged. Giovanni just wants to keep us all healthy enough that he’ll actually be able to profit off of us.

“Here.” I sigh as I crawl to the other end of the cage and offer Sadie her meal. Since my first night here, she hasn’t improved much. She spends most of her time either crying or sleeping. I’ve hardly gotten any information out of her. All I know is that she’s nineteen, and she was ignorant of the supernatural world before she tried to make some kind of ominous deal with a warlock.

She sniffles and reaches out to take her plate. “Is it safe?”

I bite my tongue before I say something mean and unnecessary. I know she’s having a hard time coping, but it’s difficult to feel sorry for her when she’s not making any effort to escape. The reason the guards are all wary of me is because I stabbed one of them with the heel of one of my Rene Caovilla sandals the first time they opened the slot of our cage. I actually got ahold of his keys too before Giovanni came over and put a sleeping charm on me.

“Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. Sadie’s eaten her meals every day we’ve been here. And yesterday she sat in the corner and cried, never once attempting to help me when they held me down and forced the food down my throat.

While Sadie hasn’t been the greatest moral support in this situation, I’ve luckily been able to befriend the selkies locked in the cage next to us. There are four of them, though only one of them speaks English. Because of them, I’ve learned that Giovanni deals in human and supernatural creature trafficking. Humans aren’t very popular and don’t sell as often since they’re so common and are already usually pretty gullible when any kind of magic is involved.

Case in point: all of the guards here are human. Not one of them is under any sort of spell, other than the promise of a large paycheck and the hope of eventual immortality.

Female creatures like selkies, pixies, mermaids, and nymphs are most in demand with Giovanni’s usual clients. But there are all sorts of creatures locked in cages in the warehouse here, many I’ve never seen before—gargoyles, trolls, satyrs, and even one lone wendigo kept in a cage a little further away from everyone else.

I settle into my corner, opposite from Sadie, and nibble at my food. My thoughts inevitably turn to Alistair whenever it’s quiet and I’m idle like this. If he knew where I was, he’d have figured out a way to get me out of here by now. So he either has no idea, which means Thaddeus, his lackey, and Bryson have managed to keep their mouths shut about my disappearance. Or something bad has happened to Al too.

My heart aches whenever I start thinking like that, and I just hope and pray that Rian and Matthieu might have been right about some of that mate stuff and they’re looking out for him.

Much later, I’m feeling restless. I make sure to stretch and exercise as much as I can in the tiny space. My ankle is still injured, but I’ve almost gotten used to the constant dull ache so long as I don’t move

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