“Yes, ma’am.” I swallowed. “Nothing.”
Over her shoulder, Obadiah was just standing there lumpily, watching the scene play out and waiting for the cue to burst into his wheezing laugh, as if the fact that we’d all been just seconds away from total annihilation were just too funny for words. If eventhatblithering idiot had figured out what was going on, what were the chances that Resi hadn’t?
Zero, as it turned out.
With one quick, livid motion, she gouged the bottlecap off its notch on the gas valve angrily, shutting it down, and threw it across the room. Apparently, it had been a rhetorical question.
She spoke in a voice as light and hollow as synthetic jade. “You. Hurt. My. Feelings.”
What? Wait, was she serious? I almostlaughed. In any case, her benevolent mistress act was officially curtains. Which meant my obedient slave act was, too, thankfuckingGod.
“Starling,” she said, stepping closer to where I, for lack of any other immediate options, still kneeled on the filth-covered floor. With one swift motion, she grabbed a lock of my hair and yanked it up by the roots, twisting my head up as I hissed sharply.
Then she exploded, kicking aside the metal bed we’d been lying on, clawing and ripping away the bandages on my hands and my bruised and bloodied torso and the wounds on the side of my head, her vanilla nails shredding to bits the delicate scabsand hooking into the weeping gashes, undoing in seconds the hours of care she’d spent on me out in the desert. “Or should I say,boy.Slave. Dog. Pup. 77?—”
“—34966,” I finished for her, gasping. “That’s right. Keep ’em coming.”
Man, defiance felt good again. Even if itwasabout to get me killed.
“So you figured out the truth about the chip,” she said haughtily. “Between that and the bracelet, you probably think you’ve freed yourself.”
Huh? But the serum hadn’t worked. My chip was still in. That’s why—unless—my mind was off to the races again.
“But you’re not even close.”
“Well, I’m a hell of a lot closer,” I choked out.
“Shut up. You haven’t even earned the privilege of a name if you were about to do what I think you were about to do to me.”
“Andeverybody else, remember,” I said.
She grabbed the chain from my neck and jerked it toward herself with more strength than I’d thought she had. “Fuckeverybody else.”
Whoa.The pain. The pain, old friend, as I became more and more unmoored from the life raft of the opioids, was raw and glaring and unadorned as she dug those vicious vanilla nails deeper into my hair and skin, sinking into my wounds like razor blades, revealing my crushed, bloody, impaled hands and wrists, hanging down like scraggly trees.
With a deep scratch across my cheekbone, she released me. I gritted my teeth to hold back a scream, sinking lower in my chains.
“Get me the grinder,” she said.
What?
Obadiah lumbered over to the shelf and pulled out a tool, one that indeed appeared to be an electric angle grinder witha spinning cutting disc, glinting in the wan fluorescence. She fired it up, the blade giving off a high-pitched whine. Then in one motion, she plunged it into my scalp like an ax, her perfect pink tongue poking out in a deranged smirk as she turned my world yet again on its axis. Turned it into a blur of pain and vibration, of my barely stifled bleats of agony as chunks of my hair and flesh flew off and back onto Resi, leaving behind red trails dripping down my scalp and into my eyes, mixing with multicolored fluids from the old, shredded wounds.
Finally, the tool switched off, the whine still vibrating in my ears. Resi set it aside. I could still feel it, though nothing sounded in the room other than my slow, labored breathing—and hers.
Reaching to the floor, she bunched one of my severed, bloody golden locks between her fingers. Her blue eyes were feral now, a rabid white wolf coated in the remains of the kill. She stood there, blinking away the blown-back flecks of my blood and flesh, holding a hand to her face, watching the scarlet trails dripping down her fingers and pooling in her nailbeds.
We watched each other, shoulders heaving.
Blood, too, trickled down my forehead and chest, staining the dust on the concrete floor. Hands crushed, wrists impaled, remnants of torn bandages dangling forlornly off them. I trembled, and a chasm of pain rose up to engulf me. Pain that I just fell into because what could I do? Resi couldn’t justkillme right now, could she?
“We could have—” she began and didn’t finish. Just stood there, her voice impossibly small. “Why aren’t you—Why aren’t you like?—”
Oh. I could have kicked myself for not realizing it before. “You wanted to believe it, didn’t you?” I wheezed out through my blood-filled sinuses.
“What?”
Yep. I was right.
