Chapter 7 Mehar
MEHAR
I sat on the concrete floor of the warehouse across from Thad’s cage with my back against the wall and my knees pulled up to my chest. The overhead bulb flickered the way it always did, casting everything in that sickly yellow light that made the whole unit feel like a horror movie set. Which, honestly, it was.
When I first trapped this nigga, it seemed like a bright idea.
Prime helped me set it up, and was paying the rent, and I felt powerful for the first time in my life.
A woman who had been caged by every man she’d ever loved finally putting a man in a cage of his own.
It felt poetic, justified, and necessary.
But now, six months later, I just felt crazy for doing it. I should’ve put him out of his misery a long time ago.
It wasn’t even fun anymore. He’d long stopped begging me to free him. He’d accepted his fate and I had officially broken him. He babbled incoherently whenever I visited, stringing words together that didn’t connect to anything real. I was out of my mind to keep this going.
“Thad,” I called his name.
“Ahhhh. The mango grows from a tree and the tree grows from the ground and I love it when you come around,” he babbled, his voice dry and husky like someone had taken sandpaper to his vocal cords.
The months of captivity had hollowed him out.
The old Thad had a sharp jawline, deep voice and a smile that made me stupid.
It was all gone. His beard had grown past his chest and was matted with God knows what.
The hair on his head was tangled into thick, dirty clumps that hadn’t seen water in forever.
His body had eaten itself from the inside, arms and legs thin and wasted, ribs visible through the dingy t-shirt I’d given him back in month two.
His knees had never healed correctly, both of them swollen and locked at wrong angles.
Even if I opened that cage door right now and told him to run, he wouldn’t make it two feet. His walking days were done.
I hosed him down whenever I came, but he stank so badly that the smell hit me before I even rolled the warehouse door up. Urine, sweat, and something underneath both of those things that smelled like a body slowly giving up on itself.
I was a monster. I had to be, to force a man to live like this. I had taken all the rage from the bullshit my father put me through, everything my husband did to me, and channeled it here. Thad killed my sister. And he played me. Used me as a side piece while Kacey was pregnant with his baby.
But did he deserve this? This was worse than death.
Should I have just let Prime kill his ass?
Or was I just as bad as him? Was I evil?
Misunderstood? Nothing made sense to me anymore.
Especially not after what Janelle said in our last session about walls that protect you and imprison you at the same time.
I was sitting across from a man I’d imprisoned. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
“Thad…” I said his name again, just to see if someone human was still in there.
“Me-Me-Mehar…” he sang my name like a nursery rhyme, rocking slightly in the cage the way people do when their mind has checked out and their body is just running on whatever’s left.
“You’re barely human anymore,” I said coldly.
“More human than you.”
His response shocked me. My head snapped toward the cage because his voice had changed. The babbling was gone. For a second, maybe two, Thad was back. His eyes were focused, clear, locked on mine through the bars with something that looked a lot like the truth.
“What did you say?”
“More. Human. Than. You.”
I should’ve been angry. Should’ve gone cold the way I always did when someone tried to check me.
But something about the way he said it, slow and deliberate and without an ounce of fear, made my stomach turn.
Because he wasn’t wrong. Janelle’s words from Wednesday echoed in my head—you are not broken, you are injured —and I was sitting here injuring someone else.
“How do you figure that, sister killer?” I asked, pushing the guilt back down where it belonged.
“This is no way for a man to live.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you weaseled your way into my life. But don’t worry, you won’t be living much longer,” I responded.
He clapped his withered hands together, the sound barely making a noise because his palms had no meat left on them. “About time. I been ready to die.”
“Oh yeah?” I needed to twist the knife. I didn’t want him ready to die. There was a part of me that still needed him to suffer, because internally I was suffering too and if I stopped making him pay for it I’d have to sit with my own shit. And I wasn’t ready for that.
“Yes. I’mma die and then come back and haunt you and drag you to hell, hoe!” There it was. He still had some spunk. This man couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, couldn’t feed himself without shoving scraps through a slot like an animal, but he could still talk shit. I almost respected it.
“Maybe instead of haunting me, you could go be a guardian angel over that son you never got a chance to meet, bitch. Your priorities are always fucked up.” I let that land.
Watched his face crumble in real time. “Had you not come into my life and just stayed with your little girlfriend, you probably wouldn’t be in this position.
Well—you definitely would be dead because you killed my sister. But you wouldn’t be here.”
“Let me out you stupid bitch! PLEASE! PLEASE! AHHH!” He started to cry and his voice cracked and splintered like sandpaper dragging across concrete.
Gone was the sexy deep voice I thought I was falling for.
He sounded like a ghoul—a poor, sad, curled-up shrimp of a man rattling the bars of a cage he was never leaving.
And just like that, all my guilt flew out the window. Antagonizing him made me feel better. It always did. That was probably something I should tell Janelle about, but it would go in the pile of things she’d never know.
“Well, until next time, my pet,” I said. I winked at him, stood up, brushed the concrete dust off my leggings, and walked toward the door without looking back.
The night air hit me like a reset button. Cool and clean after the stench of the warehouse, and I stood there for a second letting my lungs remember what oxygen was supposed to smell like. The parking lot was empty except for my car and the usual nothingness.
I was halfway to my car when I heard footsteps behind me, moving fast.
My body didn’t ask my brain for permission.
It never did. My hand was in my jacket pocket, fingers around the switchblade, and I spun and slashed in one motion that was muscle memory at this point—three months of self-defense classes and a lifetime of flinching had turned me into the kind of woman who cut first and asked questions after.
The blade caught flesh. I felt it connect, felt the resistance of skin splitting, and for a half second I felt that cold satisfaction of knowing I’d drawn blood before my brain caught up to what my eyes were seeing.
Before I could say anything he moved quickly and his hand clamped around my wrist, twisted the blade out of my grip like I was a child holding a toy, and then both his arms were around me from behind, locking me against his chest in a bear hold that swallowed my entire body.
“Calm the fuck down.” His voice was right against my ear, low and steady like he was talking to a spooked horse. “It’s just me. Damn,” he said, examining his hand. “You got me good.”
I threw an elbow. It connected with something solid, his ribs, maybe, and he didn’t even flinch.
I stomped at his foot, tried to drop my weight the way my instructor taught me, twisted my shoulders to break his grip, and none of it worked.
Every technique I’d practiced in class three times a week assumed the attacker would react to pain or lose their balance or give me an inch of space to exploit, and this man did none of those things.
He just held me tighter, his arms locked like steel bands across my chest and waist, and waited for me to tire myself out.
Which pissed me off even more.
“Let me GO!” I was thrashing now, fully aware that I looked insane and not caring. My pulse was in my throat, my breath was ragged, and my body was doing that thing it always did where it couldn’t tell the difference between danger and everything else.
But something was off. Something my brain registered before my body caught up to it.
His arms were tight but they weren’t hurting me.
He wasn’t squeezing, wasn’t crushing, wasn’t using his strength to punish.
He was just… containing me. The way you’d hold someone who was falling apart so the pieces didn’t scatter.
I hated that I noticed that.
“You done?” he asked after I’d burned through another ten seconds of pointless struggling.
“Let me go, Quest. I swear to God.”
He let me go, immediately. He didn’t hesitate nor linger. His arms dropped and he stepped back, giving me space, and I spun around to face him with my chest heaving and my fists balled up at my sides.
He looked at his hand again. The cut ran diagonally across his palm, deep enough to bleed steady, but not deep enough for stitches. Probably. He flexed his fingers, winced slightly, and then had the audacity to look amused.
“Well, good,” I snapped, still breathing hard. “That’s what you get for sneaking up on me.”
“I didn’t sneak up on you. I was walking. In a parking lot. At a normal pace. I was about to say your name, but you turned around and went Rambo on me before I got the first syllable out.”
“Maybe don’t approach a woman in a dark parking lot.”
“Noted.” He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket—who the hell still carries a handkerchief—and wrapped it around his palm. “Next time I’ll blow a safety whistle first.”
I didn’t laugh. But I wanted to, and I hated myself for that too.
“Why the fuck are you here, Quest?”
He leaned against the hood of what I assumed was his car and crossed his arms. The casual posture didn’t match the blood seeping through his handkerchief.
“Kacey reached out to me.”
My stomach dropped.
“Thad’s girl. Baby mother. Whatever. She texted me today saying Thad’s been missing for months and nobody’s giving her answers.
She’s got two kids and no money and she’s scared.
” He paused. “I met up with her earlier. She’s living out in Frederick in that house Thad bought her, barely keeping it together. ”
“And what’s that got to do with me?”
“You know exactly what that’s got to do with you.” He nodded toward the warehouse. “He’s in there, isn’t he?”
“You already know he’s in there. Prime told you.”
“Prime told me a lot of things. I’m asking you.”
“Yeah. He’s in there. And?”
“And it’s been six months, Mehar. At some point you gotta make a decision. Either put him out of his misery or let him go, but you can’t keep a man in a cage forever.”
“Watch me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” I folded my arms across my chest, mirroring his posture without meaning to. “Thad is my responsibility. I decide what happens to him and when it happens. Not you. Not Prime. Me.”
“Nobody’s trying to take that from you. I’m just saying—”
“Then don’t say it. Take care of Kacey, give her some money, whatever you gotta do for your family obligations. But what’s in that warehouse is my business.”
He studied me for a moment. That same focused look he’d given me at the wedding when his hand was on my thigh. I looked away first because I refused to let him do that to me twice.
“You don’t have it in you,” he said.
My eyes snapped back to his. “Excuse me?”
“To kill him. You’ve had six months. If you were going to do it, you would’ve done it by now. You’re keeping him alive because ending it means you lose the one thing that makes you feel in control. And you’re not ready to give that up.”
The accuracy of that statement made me want to scream. Instead, I reached into my other jacket pocket—because I kept a blade on both sides, always—pulled out my second switchblade, and flicked it open. The sound was sharp in the quiet parking lot.
“You wanna test that theory?” I held the blade up between us.
Quest looked at the knife. Looked at me. And then this man—this insane, arrogant, infuriating man—stepped forward and pressed his chest directly into the tip of the blade until I could feel the resistance of his body against the steel.
“It’s gonna take more than a butter knife to kill me, sweetheart.”
My hand was shaking. Not from fear. From something I couldn’t name and refused to examine.
He was close enough that I could smell his cologne underneath the faint copper of his own blood, and his eyes were looking down at me with an expression that had no business being on the face of a man with a knife at his chest. He wasn’t scared.
He wasn’t angry. He looked like he was genuinely enjoying himself.
I lowered the blade. Because what else was I supposed to do? Stab the man?
“You’re insane,” I said.
“Probably. But I’m also hungry.” He straightened up, adjusted his jacket like I hadn’t just held a blade to his sternum, and pulled his keys out. “Bring your mean ass and come eat with me. You look like you haven’t had a real meal in a week.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You just tried to kill me twice in the last five minutes and I’m still standing here asking you to dinner. The least you could do is say yes. Think of it as an apology for my hand.” He held up the bloodied handkerchief. “Which, by the way, still hurts.”
“Good.”
“Come on, Mean-har.” There was that stupid nickname again. And that stupid smirk. “One meal. You can bring both your little knives if it makes you feel better.”
I stood there in that empty parking lot, switchblade still in my hand, looking at him as if he were crazy.
“Fine,” I said. “But you’re paying. And I’m driving my own car.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”