JESSICA


    “Ah!”


    <b>64 </b>


    55 vouchers


    I hit the concrete hard, knees first, cheek after–his fingers still clutching the root of my hair like he’s not ready to let go, like the floor isn’t enough, like I belong beneath it. I can still smell the cages on me–hot metal, heat–rutted fur, shit and bile and birth, and something underneath all that, something that smells like <ol><li>me. </li></ol>


    I don’t scream. I don’t whimper. I just dry–heave against the floor until something pink threads out of my throat and the taste of silver makes my gums throb. Theo finally lets go, fingers slow, like he’s peeling a prize off the meat.


    “Be good,” he hums against the shell of my ear, voice low like prayer, like fucking. “You’re not alone anymore, Jess.”


    My breath stalls. My stomach folds in on itself. I twist, gagging, bracing on one elbow, and my eyes drag toward the far corner-


    He’s here.


    Riot.


    Slumped. Chained. His face is swollen on one side, ck on the other. One arm’s bent wrong, the other limp in hisp. His eyes-


    God, his eyes are open. He’s watching me.


    Riot coughs, low, wet, like something inside him’s dying slower than it should. I crawl to the farthest corner, away from the stench of his ruined breath, the sound of my own heartbeat fucking me raw.


    “W–What..happened to him?” Trembling, I ask, not showing him any fear.


    Theo squats low, gloved fingers curling under my jaw, lifting my face until I can’t pretend I’m not staring at Riot’s ruined chest rising in thin, rattling swells, every breath a confession of failure.


    “He wouldn’t kneel,” Theo murmurs, thumb pressing hard into the hinge of my jaw until it pops. “He thought he could keep you clean. Like you were ever anything but a feral little slit begging to be filled.”


    My throat spasms around a sob I won’t let out.


    Riot shifts–only an inch, but it’s enough for his chains to creak, for one hand to drag itself along his thigh. trying to move, trying to crawl to me, even when half his bones are broken.


    “You should thank him,” Theo whispers, and his breath is sour with wolfsbane and something fouler, something that smells like the back of a throat swallowing screams. “He kept you alive. He kept you sacred. But there’s nothing sacred left in you now, Jessica. Just this.”


    He drags two fingers over the seam of my lips, smearing the taste of his skin of the caves of all the male


    9:34 Thu, Sep <b>4 </b>


    <b>64 </b>


    55 vouchers


    bodies that have pinned me down and called it devotion. I don’t look away. I don’t close my mouth when he pushes them in, pressing over my tongue until I gag and the floor swims and Riot’s eyes re wide, as if he’s the one choking on my filth.


    After he was satisfied, Theo shoved me into the floor and locked the cell before leaving us all alone.


    “Jessica,” he rasped, a sound like meat tearing, like holy ruin, and it cracked something behind my ribs.


    This is the man that ruined me and yet, looking at him right now makes me want to call the moon goddess to perish all the evil in this world.


    I reached for him, even though every cell screamed no, because his chains were still rattling, because his pulse was still crawling under the meat of his throat, because he was dying.


    “Theo,” I tried to say, my tongue thick with sickness, “he–he did this?”


    Riot didn’t answer with words–he didn’t have to. His look was a wound. It poured. Pityless, soaked in rot, slick with all the things we’d be to each other in the dark: heat–bonded, death–bound, two beasts suckling on the same desecrated myth. I should have turned away. I should have backed off, swallowed it, scrubbed it out with silver if I had to, but-


    He moved. Barely. A twitch, a jolt. His chain scraped the wall with a hungry little kiss and my whole spine convulsed like I was still in heat.


    “Don’te closer–Jessica–don’t-” he rasped, the words torn through something copsing in his chest. “Jess–no. Don’t–don’t let me smell you.”


    I stopped. Mid–crawl. Elbow buckled, hand t on the piss–stained concrete, breath seizing because I knew what he meant.


    “I’m not—” I tried, but my body betrayed me, a pulse low in my belly giving me away, heat like a bruise swelling up behind my navel. “I just wanted to see–if you were-”


    I moved anyway, dragging myself on forearms, on elbows, my cheek splitting open again against the piss- slick floor, knees too raw to hold weight,.


    “Riot, please,”


    Theo had taken everything else and left me full of things I couldn’t name.


    “Don’t,” he tried again, but his chains rattled when I got close, like his body was trying to lunge even if his voice was trying to save me and when my fingers touched his ankle, bare, filthy, hot with fever, I felt something howl behind my teeth–not a scream, not a sob, but heat, raw and holy, like Riot’s dying body was a god and I was itsst worshipper.


    “You look terrified,” he said.


    “I am,” I breathed, my fingers curling in the meat of his jaw. “What the fuck is this… Riot?”


    “Stop,” he said, softer now, a ruin cracking in the wind. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”


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    But I did—I did, or I thought I did, or I needed to pretend I did, because the only thing worse than knowing was not knowing.


    “Tell me,” I whispered, curling my fingers harder into the wreck of his jaw.” I need to know everything.”


    Riotughed.


    “You want to know?” he wheezed, voice all bone and rot, his good eye gleaming fever–yellow. “You want the n, princess?”


    He sucked in air, slow, like it hurt him to give me this.


    I’ve never really looked into Riot’s eyes because I’m terrified of what I see from it but now, all I can see is eptance of fate.


    “He’s not building soldiers,” Riot hissed. “He’s building altars. You. Me. All of us–gutted, blessed, fed to the heat until it sings through our marrow. He’s not making a pack. He’s making himself the alpha.”


    I blinked, once, slow, like maybe I could shut the words out if I sealed my eyes hard enough, like I could unhear them, but Riot’s voice had already crawled down the wet pipe of my throat and lodged somewhere deep.


    “That’s-” My lip split on the word, bottom jaw trembling as if my bones wanted to cry even when my face stayed nk, a mask of dumb animalprehension. “That’s–impossible.”


    “Is it, Jess?” Chain snapped taut as he shifted–just one shoulder wrenching forward. “Is it impossible?”


    I wanted to deny it, to spit, to snarl, to make myself blind or dumb from everything that had happened but there’s no denying or running from all of this.


    “You have to help me get out of this ce.”


    Riotughed–short, sharp, cruel. “Out?”


    I crawled closer, knees bleeding from the stone, hips grazing the floor with every breath, and that’s when he shifted again, spine bowing sharp as a broken bowstring.


    “Undo the chain,” he growled, raw–voice wet, voice feral, voice godless.


    My fingers froze above the lock, heat from his skin soaking mine, the stink of him–salt, fever, rot, blood- blessing me down to the wrist.


    I’m almost getting the chains out of him when I hear a voice. His voice.


    “Yes, Jessica,” I gasped–sucked spit down the wrong pipe and choked on it. “Undo the chain. Let the monster


    out.”


    9:34 Thu, Sep 4