26. Emma
twenty-six
Emma
Ilet Adam bleed until the screaming stopped. Then I let him bleed some more.
The bunker went so still you could hear the rust flake from the door hinges two cells down.
I cleaned up the trail of blood with a squeegee, not because I cared, but because the smell would hang for days otherwise, and I was the one who had to live with it.
I left him in the med room, a knot of towels pressed between his legs, his body locked into the fetal curve of a child who has finally learned the word “no.”
Upstairs, the girl was awake. She asked if it was morning yet.
I lied, told her it was almost breakfast, then set her up with a video on the laptop and closed the door behind me.
You could live your whole life making up little fictions for children and never see the cost, but this morning I could see every one of my own in the sharp blue lines under my eyes.
When I went back down, I left the main lights off.
My boots hit the concrete with a weight I’d never felt before—every step echoed, every echo sharpened the air.
The gun was heavy in my hand, unholstered, the cold metal a promise rather than a threat.
I didn’t bother with a uniform or the practiced lines. I just walked.
The women heard me before they saw me. Molly was the first to react—her voice, usually high and brash, flattened to a tight little breath.
Renata pressed herself to the far corner of her cell, knees up, arms hugged to her chest, eyes following the arc of my movement like a prey animal waiting for the predator to pass.
Sandra, the oldest, just watched, arms folded, jaw set so hard the muscle stood out like a finger pressed under skin.
They all felt it, the way you feel an earthquake in the pit of your gut before the world decides which buildings to knock over.
Jasmine waited. That was her play: always wait. When I stopped at her cell, she was already up, feet planted shoulder-width apart, every muscle awake but not flexed. She didn’t look at my face. She looked at the gun.
I opened the door.
“Come with me,” I said, and the words came out clipped, syllables stripped down to the root. No threat, no promise, just the basic shape of command.
She stepped out, chin high, mouth tight, but her eyes darted once to the blood speckled on my left sleeve. She clocked it, then looked at the gun again, then at my face. She saw what she needed to see. We walked.
I didn’t cuff her. I didn’t need to. The compound was built for this: even in open air, the world outside these walls was all mine.
I led her past the bunker kitchen and the old storage closet, down the hallway nobody used.
The utility room was just as I’d left it—concrete walls, floor sloped to the drain, the showerhead bolted six feet up and flanked by a rusted shelf of cleaning supplies.
The towels were stacked four high, all folded the same, all mine.
“Strip,” I said.
She did. No complaint, no delay, just a straight-line calculation.
Shirt off first, then bra—sports, black, the elastic worn to a shine—then pants, then panties.
She stood naked, arms loose at her sides, scar on her chin brighter in this light than I’d ever seen it.
Her nipples were hard from cold, skin marked with old bruises.
She didn’t cover herself. She didn’t look at me, either.
I flicked the lever on the shower. The water hit the drain with a sound like applause. She stepped under, eyes up, and let it run. It started cold. She didn’t flinch.
I watched her. Not for anything special—just the mechanics of a person, alive and unbroken, standing under water and refusing to shake.
The gun hung in my right hand, never lifted, never needed. I used the left to toss her a bottle of shampoo. She caught it, thumbed the cap open, and worked it through her hair. The lather went thick, and the air filled with a fake citrus I hated.
She rinsed. She reached for the bar of soap. She washed, slow and methodical, making sure every inch of skin was scrubbed. It wasn’t performance. She was washing off the last two weeks—of Adam, of me, of whatever part of herself she planned to use next.
She turned the water off when she was done, not waiting for me to say so. She reached for a towel. I handed it to her.
She took it, wrapped it once around her chest, then stood there dripping, eyes fixed on the concrete six inches behind my head.
“Adam is dead,” I said. The words dropped out of me, not even a tremor in the pitch. “Last night. Blood loss.”
She blinked. “Did you kill him?”
I shook my head. “No.” I thought about adding more, then didn’t.
She waited.
“He wouldn’t let me take him to a hospital,” I said. “He made me promise.”
She didn’t move. The water traced a line down her shin and pooled on the tile.
I felt my hand open and close around the gun, the nerves firing off on their own. I set it down on the shelf. The sound it made—metal on metal—sounded bigger than it was.
“Adam always said the rules don’t change, even when it gets bad.” My voice went flat at the edges. “No outside contact. No hospitals. No deviations.”
I looked up and found her watching me, her face calm, but her hands white-knuckled around the towel.
“He wanted to die here,” I said.
She nodded, as if this fit the Adam she knew.
For a minute, neither of us spoke. The room went back to just the echo of water, the soft hiss of the drain, the thump of two hearts beating on opposite sides of a problem.
Jasmine broke the silence. “What now?”
I looked at her, and for the first time in my life I let the mask fall. “I don’t know yet.”
The admission landed in my own chest with a force I hadn’t predicted. I was supposed to have the answers. I was supposed to know every next step. But Adam was gone, and the world was suddenly wider, and I could feel the edges of it pressing in.
She dried off, towel tight around her ribs, and stood there.
I said, “You’ll go back to your cell for now. I need to think.”
She nodded, and at that moment I saw the tiniest flicker of something—respect, maybe, or just the recognition that we were both animals with a talent for waiting.
I picked up the gun, checked the safety, and gestured for her to walk ahead.
As we moved back down the hall, her bare feet squeaked on the concrete, each sound a little declaration of existence. I wondered, for a second, how it would feel to be in her position—naked, wet, but alive, waiting for the next move.
The bunker was colder now, and the lights buzzed in a different way.
We reached her cell. She stepped inside, turned, and looked at me.
I closed the door.
The lock sounded final, but for once, I didn’t believe it.
For once, I wasn’t sure who was caged and who was free.
I went back to the med room, poured myself a shot of whiskey, and watched the blood dry on the floor.
Outside, the desert was waking up, and there was a part of me that wanted to wake up, too.
But I had work to do.
And Jasmine—she was still in here with me.
The game wasn’t over.
It was just the beginning. That’s when I made the decision. I went back to Jasmine’s cell.
I stood in the center of the bunker and listened.
The silence was almost perfect, except for the trickle of drain water in the utility room and the faint static of the old air filter behind the east wall.
The new normal. It would have been easy to pretend that Adam’s rules had never mattered, but the muscle memory was still there: how you stood, how you watched, how you enforced.
I thought about sitting down, but I didn’t want to look weak.
Instead, I walked to the far wall and reached up to the ancient television bolted into the concrete above head height—a relic, left over from the original builder, but never once used in front of the women.
The remote was in the drawer under the central desk, next to a box of latex gloves and a roll of duct tape. I turned the TV on.
It powered up with a snap of blue light, screen angling down so every cell in the row had a line of sight.
No programs, no news, just the hardwired security feed, a black-and-white view of the meat room.
The picture cut to life: Sniper, still chained to the table, every muscle outlined in sweat and old blood, his face drawn tight but absolutely awake.
Jasmine’s eyes snapped to the screen.
The man hadn’t slept. I’d dosed him heavy, but he’d metabolized it or sweated it out or just refused to let chemistry do the job.
He lay with his arms above his head, wrists locked to the steel ring, his feet still spread at the base.
The wound at his shoulder was pink but closed, the dressing tight, but the rest of him looked like a crime scene.
He was still naked. I’d left him a bottle of water, just out of reach.
He stared at it, then at the camera, then closed his eyes again and slowed his breathing to almost nothing.
The only thing that moved was his right hand. Every few seconds, he’d flex the fingers, test the give of the cuff, then relax. Then start again.
I watched Jasmine watch the screen. Her body went statue-still; even the rise and fall of her ribs slowed.
The other women leaned in, Molly gripping the bars so hard her knuckles went bone-white, Renata pressed to the mesh with her cheek flattened, Sandra standing a pace back, arms folded, but her eyes flickering between Jasmine and the feed.
I waited for someone to speak. No one did.
On screen, Sniper worked the problem, slow and methodical. His fingers traced the screw holding the ring to the table. He clocked the pattern, tested the torque, calculated what might get him free. I’d read his file. I knew he’d broken out of worse. But here, all he could do was gather data.
Jasmine’s hands tightened on the bars, and her jaw flexed, a tic of tension like a muscle about to tear. She didn’t blink for a full minute.
I kept my voice level, not looking at her but at the screen. “Payback is a bitch,” I said.
She didn’t answer. None of them did.
I pulled out a chair, set it at the center desk, and sat. I watched the feed for another five minutes, long enough for the tension to soak into the grout between every block in the room. Nobody said a thing.
Then I got up, left the TV running, and walked out. The gun went with me, holstered now, because I wanted them to see my back and know I was still the one who decided what happened next.
I hit the lights in the outer corridor. Even from halfway up the stairs, I could feel the sound: not silence, not anymore, but the friction of four women and a television and a single man on a table, all of them waiting for the next move.