23. Emma
twenty-three
Emma
Jasmine had the best cell in the row—far end, cot by the wall, no neighbor on her right and nothing but block between her and the outside.
She sat with her knees up, back straight, hands folded so loose it looked like she was holding a dead bird.
Her hair was wild today, not in the way of someone who’d given up, but in the way of someone who liked it better when things were hard to comb.
Her eyes were open and black and taking inventory before I even got the chair set.
I put it down just beyond the bars, sat, crossed my legs. “How’s your sleep?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She let her bare feet drop to the floor—no blanket, no socks—and stood up, slow and deliberate. She walked to the bars and put her hands on them, one hand above the other, as if she were testing the gauge of the steel with just her nerves.
I watched her the way I would watch an animal the moment it decided whether the cage was really a cage, or just the edge of the world.
“You came for something,” Jasmine said.
I gave her a half-smile, no teeth. “What kind of man is Sniper, really?”
She gave me nothing, just the tight muscle of her jaw working under her skin.
“Not the patch, not the club face,” I clarified. “The man you married. What does he do that makes you say yes, when everything else about your life is no?”
She looked at the floor, then back up, and for a second her mouth twitched like she might say something mean, or maybe just funny.
“He doesn’t stop,” she said, voice flat.
“That’s the whole of it. Most men start a thing and then get tired, or bored, or scared they’ll fuck it up.
Sniper will burn down his own house if it means finishing the job.
” Her hands tightened on the bars. “He’s loving, but not gentle.
He’s mean, sometimes, but it’s always in the service of the person he loves.
He’s smart. Smarter than anyone gives him credit for.
And he’s…” She trailed off, which told me more than the rest of it.
I waited. I could outwait anyone.
“He’s kind,” she finished. “Not in the way people mean when they talk about being nice. He’s kind in the way a surgeon is, or a man who would break his own fingers to set a bone straight.”
I nodded. She watched my face the whole time she spoke, as if she wanted to see what I’d do with the information, or maybe if I was even capable of processing it. It’s rare for people to pay that much attention after they finish talking.
I leaned back in the chair and let the legs drag against the floor, an ugly scraping that set her teeth on edge.
“Did you know Adam was once a vegetarian?” I said.
“Lasted three years, until he realized the only way he could enjoy a thing was to make it his own. That’s how it is with him and women, too.
” I shrugged. “He doesn’t break people because he likes it.
He does it because he needs to see what’s left after the pressure is off. ”
Jasmine laughed—a sharp, clear sound. “He owns every woman in here, including you.”
I let my lips split into a smile. It was empty, and I let her see it. The trick of a smile is you never put anything in it you’re not willing to have thrown back at you.
“I don’t belong to Adam,” I said, and for the first time there was a new tension in the air, something too brittle to have been in the room before.
She held my gaze, searching for the crack. “He’s programmed you better than any of the rest. You actually think you’re a free agent.” She said it as if it was a kindness.
I stood. I moved the chair back a foot, so the bars cast a shadow between us.
“You want the punchline? It’s this: Adam doesn’t care if you hate him or love him.
He just needs you to be real. If you’re real, you’re useful.
If you’re not, you get the four walls and the light and the counting days until you stop being real. ”
Jasmine stepped even closer, her face pressed so close to the bars I could see the shine on her cheek. “Sniper will come for me,” she said. “He’ll cut through you, through Adam, through every trick in this place. And when he does, I’ll let you watch.”
I shrugged again, but this time it felt different. “You keep believing that,” I said. “It’s what makes you special.”
She let her hands fall from the bars and went back to the cot. She didn’t sit. She stood, arms at her sides, eyes on me, and for the first time I realized I wasn’t just watching her. I was being watched.
I angled my phone so the screen’s light painted a perfect rectangle on the bars.
“There are twelve cameras in this building,” I said. “Four outside. Eight inside, covering every angle you’d want to cover, if you were paranoid, or maybe just careful.”
Jasmine looked at the phone, not at me. “You keep the feeds open at all times?”
I swiped up, ran my thumb through the list of cameras like it was nothing. “I could watch the desert for miles. The perimeter. The corridor you’re in. The air lock at the main entrance. Adam’s office, my kitchen, the storage room. Nothing you do goes unseen.”
She stood, crossed to the bars, and set her hand against the mesh. It was new—a strip of steel with diamond cutouts, just small enough to stop fingers, just big enough to let sound through. She leaned in, eyes moving like a scanner across every pixel of the screen.
“Let me see the outside,” Jasmine said.
I flicked to the first camera: desert, no road, just sage and scrub and the ghost shadow of the fence line.
I waited for her to track the horizon, to clock the time of day, to notice the distant patch of disturbed soil by the east corner where the last landscaping job had gone sideways.
She took it all in. I scrolled to the next: the hatch at the main entry, the thick slab of steel, the keypad, the dust smears on the access panel.
Next, the corridor. Next, the storage room—shelves, boxes, cleaning fluid, nothing out of place.
Jasmine tracked everything. She didn’t ask questions, just pressed her face so close to the bars her eyelashes brushed the mesh.
I let her study the feeds for a full minute before I scrolled further. Then I let the feed go dead. Blank, no camera, just a white screen.
Jasmine looked up. “What’s in the dead space?”
I smiled. “You’re going to like this,” I said, and scrolled again.
The screen came up on a room she’d never seen.
Same cinder block walls, same overhead light, but the space was wider, the bars thicker, the cells arranged in a ring instead of a row.
Six men, each in their own cell, each with a cot, a bucket, and a line of chain running from the wall to a shackle at the ankle.
The men weren’t talking, but the audio was live: you could hear the sound of someone breathing, the shuffle of a bare foot on cold tile, the metal-on-metal clink of a restless hand.
One of them, maybe fifty, maybe younger, sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the floor, unmoving.
Jasmine’s whole body stilled. She didn’t blink.
“These are mine,” I said. “I designed it to contain people who can’t be contained by normal means.
” I tilted the phone so the men’s faces were clear.
“Each one is ex-military, or law enforcement, or used to getting their way with a gun or a threat. Some of them are killers. All of them thought they were above us.”
Jasmine watched the feed, not even breathing.
“You thought it was just women,” I said, voice calm, not bragging. “You thought Adam was the monster. But this is my project. I contain men like him, and women like you, because I want to know what the world does to people who never get told no.”
She shook her head. “You’re insane,” she said, not as an insult, but as a diagnosis.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I built this place. Adam just occupies it. He’s never owned me.” I swiped back to the corridor feed, just to watch her eyes adjust to the shift. “I don’t belong to anyone, Jasmine. But I can make anyone belong to me, if I want it enough.”
Jasmine let go of the bars. She backed away, then leaned in again. “Sniper will come,” she said, voice low. “He will cut through Adam, through you, through every wall and every camera, and he will not stop until he’s dead or I’m free.”
I believed her, a little.
“Men like Sniper,” I said, “always come for what they think is theirs. But they don’t realize places like this exist only for people like them. They think they’re rescuers. They think they’re wolves. But you know what happens to wolves in cages?”
Jasmine said nothing.
“They go mad, or they become pets.” I smiled again, but only with the left half of my mouth. “And I already have enough pets.”
She reached for the bars, then stopped herself. She looked down at her own hands, turned them over as if she might find a flaw in the skin. Then she looked at the phone, the men in the cells, and for a second, just a second, I saw something in her eyes that wasn’t anger or defiance or even hope.
It was strategy.
She knew I had shown her the cards for a reason. She knew there was a move to be made, but only if she could wait out the dealer. She watched the screen, silent, letting every detail burn into her memory.
I let her. “You want me to leave this on?” I asked.
“No,” she said, voice steady. “I’ve seen enough.”
I closed the phone, tucked it into my robe, and stood.
“Good talk,” I said, and walked away.
As I turned the corner, I looked back. Jasmine was sitting on her cot, head in her hands, but her eyes were wide open, scanning the wall, the light, the floor, the bars.
She was building the map in her head.
The difference between us, I thought, is that I’d already built it.
The only question left was whether she’d find the exit, or die trying.
***
I didn’t plan to come back so soon, but the algorithm of power only works if you keep the opponent off balance.
I used the same chair. Same phone. Different face: today I’d let my hair down, no tie, just the naked, impossible symmetry of twins who never had to share a womb.
Jasmine was waiting. She was always waiting. It’s what I liked about her.
I set the chair, sat, and thumbed the phone to life. “You want to see something?”
She said nothing. But she stepped to the bars, hands loose at her sides.
I swiped to the last feed. The processing room.
Concrete, tile, stainless, the lines so clean you could perform surgery or a murder and the result would be the same: a body, perfectly prepared.
The center table was steel, bolted to the slab, with an after-market set of chain restraints welded to the legs.
On it, Sniper. Shirtless, arms wide, right shoulder bandaged, the skin under his jaw gone gray with pain and lack of blood.
He was awake. He didn’t move. Even through the camera I could see the weight of his stare.
Jasmine’s breath stopped. Not a gasp. Not even a catch. She just stopped drawing air, as if the body didn’t need it for this part. Her hands flexed, slow, and then closed on the bars. She looked at the screen, not at me. I let her. This was her moment.
I felt a twist of admiration.
“He’s alive,” I said, soft enough to not even reach the next cell. “Adam patched him up. We’re not done with him yet.”
She watched. She saw the single drop of blood already darkening the gauze.
I scrolled to the next clip with audio. The lighting changed, a little brighter. Me in the blue robe, hair back, face clean, no makeup. Sniper on the table, bandage fresh. The video was fixed on the edge of the table, the perfect view for what came next.
The footage was not subtle. Me with the knife, slicing the waistband off his jeans.
The way his whole body tensed as I made a show of stripping him, exposing him, holding him open to the world.
I wrapped my hand around his cock and jerked it, slow and mechanical.
He tried not to react, but the body is its own enemy; in the end, he bucked, groaned, and came, a perfect arc spattering his thigh and the metal edge.
I wiped my hand, put the chair back, and left.
The video ended on his face: flushed, alive, full of hate, but also the smallest, strangest trace of relief.
I watched Jasmine watch it. She never broke. She didn’t cry, didn’t scream, didn’t even curse. She let go of the bars, stepped back, and stood in the middle of the cell, hands at her sides.
She looked up at me, and her eyes were black and absolute.
“You made a mistake,” she said.
I waited.
“Not in showing me,” she said. “In coming here at all.”
The words hit like cold water. I let myself feel it, the small wobble at the heart of my performance. I steadied. “Adam has never met a woman he couldn’t reach. And Sniper, wherever he is, isn’t going anywhere.” I stood, folded the chair, and tucked the phone into my pocket.
I wanted to slam the door, but I closed it gently, the click echoing down the hall.