Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Raven awoke to a darkness so complete that for several dreadful seconds, she thought she was dead. She didn’t know where she was or why she wasn’t safe in her comfortable bed. Why the bonobos weren’t calling to each other in the distance. Why her father wasn’t snoring down the hall.
Reality crashed into her with the force of a charging bull. With the horrific memories slamming into her brain came the fresh assault of pain—and the fear.
Raven gasped. The hurt radiated from every muscle and bone in her body. The sweet release of unconsciousness faded quickly. The pain took center stage.
The pain was immense. Everything ached. Her right ribs throbbed. The sickening pain pulsed like a second ragged heartbeat. She wasn’t sure if it was cracked or broken or simply deeply bruised. It hurt, and badly.
At least she had saved Luna. At least the wolves were free.
Forcing her head to clear, she took careful stock of her surroundings. She opened her eyes wide and blinked. Wherever she was, it was nearly pitch black. She lay on something hard, unforgiving.
Somewhere above her, thunder rumbled ominously. Rain pelted the metal roof. Tree branches scraped against the exterior walls like fingernails.
Lightning pulsed and flickered, wavering across slick steel walls. Painfully, Raven turned her head. She lay on a concrete floor inside a square concrete box.
Another pulse of lightning flared through an open service door a few feet to her right. The bars in the sliding gate glimmered faintly. The sliding gate led to another gate with a reinforced mesh screen. Beyond that lay the animal enclosure.
A creeping dread stole over her. She knew where she was: the tiger house.
The gates were closed, locked, and chained.
The Headhunters had locked her inside. She was caged like an animal.
They’d trapped her in here until they decided to kill her, or perhaps they would torture her some more, play with her the way a cat plays with its dinner.
Dekker wanted her to suffer. He’d promised that in the end, she would be the one begging them for death.
Sheer animal panic rose within her like a deep, dark sea, threatening to consume her, to swallow her whole. She’d asked for this. She’d put herself at risk. This was her fault.
Raven fought down the rising terror. If she had any chance of getting out of this alive, she needed to think, to be smart. Stretching her arms out, she patted down her body, searching for her weapons.
Her backpack was gone. Her tranquilizer gun was gone. But the little whittling knife stuffed deep in her cargo pocket—it was still there. They hadn’t searched her as thoroughly as they should have. She was just a nuisance to them. A pretty prize.
Little good the tiny blade would do her now.
A strange scraping sound to her left drew her attention.
Outside the tiger house gates, the shadows shifted, coalesced into a thick dark shape. A monstrous thing loomed above her. A terrible demon. A monster more dangerous than any tiger.
Her lungs constricted in fear. The walls of the small square room blurred. She blinked rapidly. The shadows solidified into the shape of a man.
Damien.
No. The dark shape was too bulky, too huge to be Damien. The dark figure leaned forward to peer at her. She caught the gleam of the whites of his eyes. She smelled smoke and the burned stench of charred meat.
Outside, lightning streaked the sky. The pulse of light highlighted the hard planes of his face, the square stubbled jaw. The tattoo snaking up his thick neck. The shine of his teeth.
Vaughn smiled that cruel, familiar smile. “It doesn’t have to be this way, you know.”
She wanted to hurt him. To smash in his smug evil face with a brick. To stab him in the throat with the whittling knife hidden in her pocket.
But she was caught in a cage. Helpless, trapped, impotent. She could do nothing, and he knew it.
She licked her swollen lip and spat out the blood caked between her teeth. “Go to hell.”
Vaughn sat against the wall outside the tiger’s cage. He held a hunting knife. The long sleek blade gleamed as he flicked it back and forth between his large hands. “I’m a reasonable man, you’ll find. One of the more reasonable ones left in this world.”
She tried to move. Her stomach lurched, a surge of acid burning the back of her throat. She sucked in her breath, her jaw stiff as a rusted hinge.
As her eyes adjusted to the flickering dark, she made out more distinctive details. Vaughn stretched his legs languidly out in front of him. Next to him, on his right side, lay a familiar shape. Her backpack. The top rim of the hoverboard stuck out slightly.
“That’s mine.”
A flash of white teeth. “Not anymore, it’s not. To the victors go the spoils, though you threw a wrench in that when you burned the storage shed and all that food.” He set the knife in his lap and unfolded something she hadn’t noticed before. “What’s this map for?”
“None of your business.”
“Hmmm. This leads to somewhere important. Doesn’t it?”
Acrid rage stung the back of her throat. She wanted to vomit. He’d stolen her map, too. “It’s nothing. It was my father’s. I just wanted something of his, that’s all.”
“You’ll tell me in time.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“I’d wager this is where you were headed before we took your wolf. Somewhere with more food, I’d bet, if I were a betting man.”
“Go to hell.”
“You said that already,” Vaughn said. “You know, when it all goes to hell, it’s not necessarily the strong who survive.
It’s not the prepared. Not even the ones who saw it coming.
The ones who survive are the ones willing to do anything, to anyone, at any time, to keep breathing.
There is no moral code in the jungle. No mercy on the savanna. There are only predators and prey.”
Even rolling her eyes hurt. “Sounds like a steaming pile of B.S. you tell yourself in the middle of the night when you miss your mommy.”
Vaughn chuckled.
Cautiously, Raven eased herself into a sitting position.
She felt her face, wincing at the swelling around her left eye, the split lip, the blood dried in a thin line on her chin.
She lowered her hands and gingerly pressed her ribs.
A spasm jolted through her ribcage. Throbbing, fiery needles stabbed and sliced through flesh and muscle and bone.
She hissed through the pain. But she could move, at least. There was that.
“We are going to break you in ways you cannot even imagine,” Vaughn said.
“I won’t break.”
“I assure you, everyone breaks with the right pressure applied. It will take time. And it will be horrific for you.” He paused, as if to let his words sink in, let the horrors of her imagination take root, dig in deep.
She dug her dirty fingernails into her palms to keep from screaming. She refused to let him see her fear.
“The gentleman in me would rather not contemplate such a fate for you, considering you are of the weaker sex.”
Raven snorted.
Vaughn continued like she hadn’t made a sound. “It is out of my hands, you see. You killed Dekker’s brother. He has the right to retribution, however he sees fit. It is our code. Our law.”
“Kill or be killed, right? That’s the new law, according to you. Because there are no more laws. Because there is no one left to enforce them.”
“The old ways are for the weak. In this new world, the only law is the law of nature. And nature survives. Nature kills. It is the natural state of things.”
People have killed each other since the beginning of time. It wasn’t anything new. But now… now there was nothing to stop men like this from killing and killing and killing again. To kill anyone and everyone, according to their whims.
There were myriad ways a person could hurt and kill another person. Other species killed their own kind—in battles for dominance, territory, and the right to mate.
When Raven was seven, the refuge had taken in several chimpanzees. Six months later, two of the chimps conspired to assassinate their alpha.
They waited until Zachariah and the other keepers had gone for the night, then they viciously attacked their leader. The two chimps bit off their victim’s fingers and testicles, then left him to bleed to death on the enclosure floor.
The next morning, when she went with her father to clean out their night house, it was Raven who discovered the dead, mutilated chimp.
She could still recall vividly the damp chill of horror. The way her father had stepped back with an involuntary gasp, shielding her eyes with his hand, though she’d already seen enough. She’d seen everything.
Her father had believed that animals were elevated, evolved, and honorable, somehow above the horrors and atrocities of humankind.
Perhaps for the most part, they were. But not always.
Animals weren’t free of the stigma of brutality.
In the wild, groups of chimpanzees waged war on other troops. A group of chimps would hold down an enemy while the others dismembered him, tearing the enemy apart, limb by limb.
When a male lion joined a new pride, he would kill the cubs sired by another lion. Juvenile foxes, owls, and hyenas sometimes killed and then ate their siblings. Orcas had been known to sadistically torture and kill other living creatures simply for their entertainment.
But it was humans who had turned the murder of other humans into an art form—en masse, by the hundreds of millions, by the billions. One man butchered another for greed, jealousy, or power. Or for no other reason than perverse pleasure. Because they could.
“We are not slaves to our natures,” Raven said. “We can choose.”
“I doubt that.”
She closed her eyes, saw again the blood slick on her hands. To survive, she would kill. But not for nothing. Not like these vicious bastards. “You can choose not to kill me.”
“Perhaps.” Vaughn shifted slightly in the dark. “You may be right. Perhaps we can come to an agreement. There is an alternative. If you will consider it.”