She bared her teeth like a feral cat, showing sharp canines and rage. “I didn’t think you’d show.”
“Disappointed?”
“No…relieved.”
I sucked in a breath. “Relieved?” A scowl pulled my brows low. “How so?”
“It means I can stop repeating all the things I want to say to you. A speech I’ve rehearsed while my feet bruised from the wire and my dignity was shredded thanks to peeing in a bucket.”
“So you didn’t find the cage inviting?” I cocked my head. “What a surprise.”
She sniffed with temper. “I have so many things to say. So many curses I want to deliver. I want to tell you that you’ll never put me back in that place…but I know there’s no point. You can, and you probably will.”
Her head tipped up as I stalked toward her. “You have control in that, you know. Obey, and you live in luxury. Disobey, and the cage becomes your new home.”
She stiffened. Her belly filled and flattened as she inhaled. Her nakedness caused my lust to swarm like a thousand wasps, hissing through my veins, filling me with venom to take. I hated that I’d done that to her. But I’d do it again if it meant I could protect myself from her.
This woman.
Christ.
“That cage…who did it belong to?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You say who, but don’t you mean what?”
She frowned, mulling over my point that all humans spoke of creatures as a thing and not a soul. “Did the animal have a name?”
My stomach clenched. “Of course.”
“Then my question still stands. Who lived in that cage?”
My heart shed off its heavy hive of lust in favour of a deadly pounding potion of interest. She continued to surprise me. And each surprise punctured my defences a little more.
Clearing my throat, I murmured, “Ace. A chimpanzee.”
“How long did he live in there?”
“Before I sent him into whatever afterlife there is for apes? Years. Decades.”
She blanched. All colour slid from her cheeks, faded from her chest, pooled by her feet. “Decades?” She shook her head, sending hair whispering over her perfect skin. “On that wire floor?” Tears coated her grey gaze, turning them into rain clouds. “God.”
I’d come here prepared to battle with her temper. To antagonise her into fury because having her hate me was the only way I could fool myself into thinking I didn’t want her. But I wasn’t prepared for her empathy. Or for the way her mind switched from her own uncomfortable night, translating that to the pain of the cage’s prior resident.
A poor monkey whose days included being injected with drugs, hair shaved, and chemicals applied to delicate skin, being placed into crushes so he couldn’t move while scientists dropped all manner of so-called miracle medicines into his eyes to see if he’d scream. No part of his body was his own. His ears, his mouth, his anus, his flesh. All of it had some role for testing.
I cleared my throat again, chasing away the chill under my suit.
Eleanor blinked back her grief, her shoulders no longer tense with fight but rolled with sadness. She actually laughed once. A single sound of mirthless misery. “You know…I actually thought I was coping pretty well with my new reality. I refused to talk to the traffickers because my silence put me above them. I lived through your sexual initiation. I set aside my embarrassment and faced Euphoria as best I could. I didn’t let a chance of escape pass me by even though I knew it was probably futile.”
Licking her lips, she added, “I even felt a bit of pride. Can you believe that? Pride that I hadn’t broken. That I stood up to you. That I kept waking up each day myself and not some broken replica. But wow…” She shook her head again, dropping her gaze to her feet, standing on one leg to study the faint red marks on her sole, courtesy of the cage wire. “I’m nothing compared to Ace.”
A tremble began in my thighs, infecting my body and hands. I wanted her to shut up…before she could ruin me in an entirely new way.
But her delicate voice fell with a harsh whisper, “Abuse comes in so many forms. A single moment or prolonged event. After one night, I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to never spend another in that cage…and because I can talk to you—because we speak the same language, I probably stand a good chance of achieving that goal. However, a poor chimp or dog or cat—any creature at the hands of prolonged abuse—doesn’t have the ability to speak. Even though they’re probably begging for death, they still wag their tail when their owner comes, hoping that today will be the day they get a scratch instead of a kick. Each time the cage opens, they trust that maybe they’ve been good enough to be freed. That there is an end to a punishment that they didn’t deserve. And each day the kick comes, and the cage closes, and they wonder what they did wrong.”