Chapter 4 Another cage
Jessica
She was kicking and fighting in her dreams again when the alarm yanked her out of it.
The room was dark and for a moment she just sat there with her chest heaving, not knowing what was real and what she had dragged out of sleep with her. She reached over and clicked on the bedside lamp and that was when she saw it. Red lights blinking through the gap under the door, pulsing in and out, and that sound, that hard blaring alarm cutting through everything.
She knew that sound.
Her stomach dropped the moment she recognized it. That sound and those lights meant one thing. Breach. Police. Something going wrong. She had heard it enough times back at the warehouse to know what came after and none of it was ever good.
She threw the sheets off and went straight to the window. The curtains were heavy but she shoved them aside and pressed close to the glass and looked down and her chest constricted so hard it hurt. The ground was so far below it made her head swim. This was a penthouse. Dozens of floors up. There was no way down, no ledge, nothing to grab, nothing that ended anywhere except the pavement and she was not desperate enough for that yet.
She stepped back from the window and turned around and that was when she heard them.
Boots. Outside her door, heavy and fast, multiple sets moving from somewhere further in the building and getting closer and closer until they stopped right outside her room and her whole body stiffened.
The door opened.
A man stepped inside and she did not wait for him to speak.
“Get off me!” She pressed back against the wall. “What are you trying to do?”
He did not answer. He just kept walking toward her and his silence was worse than anything he could have said because she knew what that meant.
The broken glass from the night before was still on the floor near her feet and her hand found a piece before she had made any decision at all. Her fingers closed around it and she lunged at him and drove it straight at his face. He recoiled and grabbed for her wrist but she twisted away and slashed again and this time it caught his cheek hard and blood came fast and he yelled and staggered backward into the dresser behind him.
“Get her!” someone shouted from outside.
Three of them poured through the door at once. She spun and caught the first one across the forearm before he could get a grip on her and he cursed and grabbed at her sleeve and she yanked free and drove her knee hard into the second one and he buckled and the third one got both arms around her from behind and lifted her off the floor completely.
She screamed and rammed her elbow back into his ribs and bit down on the arm locked across her chest and thrashed with both legs, feet connecting with whoever was close enough. Someone grabbed her ankle. Someone else grabbed her hair. She clawed at every hand that touched her and kept screaming and kept twisting because she was not going to stop, she had never been able to stop, not when everything in her body was telling her to fight or end up somewhere worse than this room.
“Hold her still!”
“Watch the glass she’s still got it!”
“Just pin her against the wall!”
They slammed her back and the impact knocked the breath out of her but her hand stayed closed around the glass and she gritted her teeth against the pain shooting up her arm and drove her heel back into the shin of the one holding her and he swore and tightened his grip and she screamed again, louder this time, loud enough that her throat burned with it.
Her palm was bleeding badly now, the glass cutting deeper every time she gripped it, blood running down her wrist and dripping off her elbow onto the floor, but she did not open her hand and she did not stop fighting and she was not going to.
Then the men holding her went rigid all at once.
The shouting cut off. The ones grabbing at her arms loosened their grip without anyone telling them to and she felt it, that change in the room, the way all of them pulled back slightly like something had walked in behind her that none of them wanted to be standing too close to.
Footsteps came through the door and Michael strode in, his eyes swept across the room and landed on her, pinned against the wall with blood on her hands and the glass still in her fist and three of his men standing around her looking like they would rather be anywhere else on earth.
“Get your hands off her.” He did not raise his voice. “Every single one of you. Now.”
They stepped back immediately, all three at once, arms dropping, eyes going to the floor. The grip on her arms disappeared and she sagged slightly and then caught herself and straightened up and kept the glass in her hand.
Michael came to her. His eyes went to her face first, then down to her bleeding hand, then back up. He reached out toward her wrist and she flinched back hard and he stopped.
“Are you okay,” he said.
She said nothing. Her chest was still heaving and her hand was throbbing all the way up to her shoulder and her throat was raw from screaming. She stared straight past him and kept her jaw clenched because she was not going to let any of it show more than it already had.
He held her wrist a moment longer then turned around and saw the guard slumped against the dresser behind him, one hand pressed to his face, blood soaking through his fingers and running down onto his collar, the dresser cracked where he had hit it going down.
Michael looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned back to her.
“What have you done, Princess?“
