Chapter 3 #2
We talk. Carefully, in voiced whispers, ears pressed to concrete.
She tells me about the group home—the overcrowding, the staff who didn't care, the older boys who scared her.
She tells me about the street—sleeping in a church doorway, panhandling for food, the terror of being nineteen and invisible.
She tells me about the woman who recruited her—mid-thirties, kind smile, drove a clean car.
She had a clipboard. It looked official.
I tell her my name. That I'm twenty. That I was taken from a parking lot.
I don't tell her about the Graves brothers or that I might know more about this place than I’m leading on—partly because I don't trust the walls, and partly because none of it matters.
The brothers aren't coming. I've made my peace with that.
Whatever the Graves response was, it wasn't enough, because I'm still here.
And so is Wren.
"Do you know anyone else?" I ask. "The others. The ones in the other cells."
"There's a guy," she says. "A couple walls over from me. He talks sometimes. His name is Darren. He's been here longer than me—like three weeks."
"Can you get a message to him?"
A pause. "Maybe. There's a vent that connects our cells. If I talk into it loud enough, he can hear me. It's how he told me about the schedule."
"What schedule?"
"The deliveries. He's been here long enough to learn the patterns.
He says there's a fire exit somewhere near the—" She hesitates.
"He calls it the display wing. I don't know what that means.
But there's a stairwell that goes down to a loading dock.
And every other day, around five in the morning, a truck comes.
Darren says the rolling door stays open for about ten or fifteen minutes. "
A fire exit. A loading dock. A twelve-minute window every other day at 5 AM.
I file it. Store it in the same place I store everything—the mental notebook, the catalog of details that might mean nothing or might mean everything. I don't let myself feel hope. Hope is a luxury I've already spent.
But I file it.
"Wren, ask Darren something for me. Ask him if he's seen the layout. How many guards on this level. Where the cameras are. Anything he knows."
"Okay." A pause. "Max?"
"Yeah?"
"Are we going to get out?"
The honest answer is: probably not. The honest answer is that I'm zip-tied in a concrete cell in an omega trafficking facility, and no one is coming, and the blockers are failing, and soon my heat will return and I'll be exactly the product they want me to be.
And the prospect of trying to fight back and find my way out of here, get me and Wren to safety, makes my knees want to buckle.
"I'm working on it," I say instead. And it's not a lie—not exactly. Working on it might just mean learning the shape of the cage. But it's something. It's the only thing I can give her.
We're quiet for a while after that. Wren starts humming—not the lullaby this time, just a soft, aimless melody that drifts through the wall like smoke.
I close my eyes and let it fill the cell.
It's the closest thing to warmth I've felt since I got here that didn't come from a needle or from my own failing biology.
The humming fades. The silence comes back—the hum, the pipes, the distant crying.
But it's different now. The silence has a shape it didn't have before. There's someone on the other side of this wall who knows my name, and I know hers, and that's not nothing. In a place designed to turn people into numbers, it might be the only thing that matters.
I'm sitting against the wall, forehead resting on my drawn-up knees, when I hear it.
A guard change. The heavy boots stop outside my door. Two voices—low, clipped, the bored shorthand of men at the end of a shift.
"—Vasquez wants the bloodwork expedited on the new one."
"Which new one? 14 or 17?"
"17. The Graves one."
My body goes still. Every cell, every nerve, locked in place. Listening.
"What's the rush?"
"Graves meeting is tonight. Ellis wants the omega prepped."
Prepped.
The word drops through me like a stone through dark water.
The Graves meeting is tonight. The brothers. Kline is meeting with the brothers. Which means negotiations are happening, terms are being discussed, and I'm—
Ellis wants the omega prepped.
I don't know what prepped means. Don't know what they're preparing me for, or why a meeting between Kline and the Graves brothers requires me to be ready. But the cold certainty settling in my gut says it's nothing good.
You don't prep a person for a conversation.
You prep a person for a display.
The guard change finishes. New boots. New rhythm. The lock doesn't buzz. They're not coming in.
Not yet.
I press my back against the wall and try to breathe. The flicker in my belly—the pilot light the blockers couldn't kill—pulses once.
Warm. Insistent.
Prepped.
I sit in the fluorescent hum and I wait.
I don't wait long.
Maybe an hour. Maybe less. The meals haven't come, so it's hard to measure, but the shadows under the door shift and the boot pattern changes again—heavier this time, deliberate, two sets approaching in lockstep—and I know before the lock buzzes that this is different.
The door opens.
Two guards I haven't seen before. Bigger than the night shift. Broader. Their faces are blank in a way that's worse than cruelty—no anger, no amusement, nothing. Just function. Bodies built for a purpose, carrying it out.
One of them holds a pair of cuffs. Real ones. Metal. Not zip ties.
"On your feet."
I stand. My legs shake but they hold.
"You’re coming with us."