But she couldn’t.
The last thing she remembered clearly was him saying, almost apologetically, “I’m sorry, Faolan. It’s not personal…”
Then there were arms. A car door. The sound of her name being said in a voice she didn’t recognise, and then darkness swallowing everything.
***
She woke up with her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
Cotton.
The smell of bleach and something sour.
Her head pounded. The air smelled like rust and old vomit. Her limbs barely obeyed, her arms curled tight around a threadbare blanket—the kind nobody chose and stayed at the bottom of the giveaway pile.
She sat up.
Or tried to.
The space was small. Metal bars. Cold concrete under her.
A cage.
It looked like a cage meant for a dog.
She opened her mouth to scream, but it came out as a cracked rasp.
The room was windowless. A storage space, maybe. Boxes lined the walls, but there was no way out. The only door looked heavy and far up a steep set of stairs. Somewhere above, water dripped in slow, steady beats.
Panic gripped her, sharp and sudden.
She gripped the bars and shook.
Nothing.
Her legs wouldn’t stop shaking. Her vision swam.
Then…
Footsteps.
One set, then another. They threaded heavy, measured.
She retreated as far back into the cage as she could, pulling the disgusting blanket around herself like armour. The door above opened, flooding the dim space with harsh light.
Four men came down, but they didn’t look at her like she was a stubborn child. No, there was interest in their eyes. They looked at her like her brothers would look at a hamburger
“She’s small… Might take longer to train,” the tallest one said, his words clinical.
“At least she is blonde; that’s always good,” another muttered.
“New stock always brings them in,” said a third. “Merchant’s happy.”
She didn’t know what that meant.
But she knew terror. She was aware of the thud of it in her chest. She was vaguely aware of the feel of her fingernails cutting into her palms.
Faolan—a name her mother gave her when she still had lapses of sobriety, between binges of drug-fuelled ecstasy—crouched behind the metal bars and stared at the monsters outside.
