He Caged Me for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Wolf's Girl Cut Loose
On her eighteenth birthday Maeve gets her father's blessing for Cian, is snatched at her truck, has the wolf cut off her back, and is told she owes fifteen years.
I turned eighteen on the day I graduated, and by sundown I was still wearing the gown.
The clubhouse lot smelled of hot chrome and cut grass.
Twenty bikes stood in a row in the June sun.
Out back under the big oak, it was only me and Cian Doyle.
He was twenty-two, with his black leather cut and his sleeves pushed up.
A green shamrock showed on his shoulder.
He had eaten at my father's table my whole life.
He fixed my first dirt bike.
He taught me to throw a punch with my thumb outside my fist.
He had never once looked at me the way he did now.
"Happy birthday, Mae."
"You said that at breakfast."
"I'm saying it again." He flicked the tassel on my cap. "Eighteen."
Then he kissed me.
I grabbed the front of his cut and kissed him back, and the bark scraped my shoulders through the thin gown.
When he pulled away he kept his forehead on mine.
His hand slid up my spine and stopped between my shoulder blades.
It stopped right on my wolf.
Everyone in the club knew that wolf.
My father's road name was Wolf, and I had been his little wolf since before I could walk.
At sixteen I had it inked across my back, so nobody could forget whose daughter I was.
"Come on," Cian said. "I'm asking your Da tonight."
"Cian. He'll kill you."
"Then I'll die asking."
He walked me straight through the clubhouse door, my gown swishing around my ankles.
The room went quiet in pieces.
A pool cue stopped. A man at the dartboard lowered his arm.
Somebody turned the jukebox down without being told.
Da sat at the end of the bar with his coffee, same as every afternoon of my life.
Under his mug lay a gray envelope with a state prison's return address, already slit open.
His hand rested flat on top of it.
He looked at our joined hands first. Then he looked at Cian.
"I want to date your daughter, sir," Cian said. "And one day I want her to be my ol' lady. I'm asking."
Da set his mug down.
He looked at Cian so long that a man behind us whispered, "Here we go."
Then he nodded, once.
"You hurt her, I bury you."
"Yes, sir."
That was all.
Four years of watching Cian across that room, settled in two sentences.
Outside, Roxie was already in the passenger seat of my truck, leaning on the horn with her bare feet on the dash.
"Party's at a farm," I told Cian. "The whole class is going."
"Go. Have fun." He tucked my hair behind my ear. "Midnight, Mae."
"Midnight."
The chair by the lot gate stood empty when we drove out.
The prospects who sat there every day had been sent home early.
I thought nothing of it, because Da had said yes.
The party was loud and stupid and perfect.
I danced with Roxie until we were both out of breath.
I didn't tell her what Da said, because I wanted to keep it to myself for one more hour.
At half past eleven I walked out to the truck for my jacket.
A hand clamped over my mouth.
An arm locked around my waist and lifted me off the gravel.
I kicked, and one sandal flew into the dark.
A van door rolled open, and somebody threw me inside.
Tape went over my mouth and around my wrists.
The door slammed, and the music shrank until it was gone.
When the tape came off, I was in a basement.
Concrete walls, one bare bulb, the smell of motor oil and wet stone.
They tied my wrists to a steel frame with my arms spread wide.
Somebody cut my shirt open from collar to hem, and the cold air hit my spine.
An old man sat in a wooden chair in the corner and lit a cigarette.
He said nothing. He only watched.
A young man stepped in front of me, with green eyes and a knife held loose in his hand.
"Hello, Maeve."
I had never seen him.
I did not know how he knew my name.
He walked behind me and touched my back, right between my shoulder blades.
Right on my wolf.
"Pretty," he said.
I screamed for Cian.
I threw my whole weight against the frame.
The big man holding me wrenched my arm back, and my shoulder tore out of its socket.
Then the knife went in.
He was not cutting skin.
He was cutting my father's name off me, and I screamed for Cian until my throat tore.
The old man tapped his ash on the floor.
Nobody came.
So I stopped screaming for him.
When they let my head drop, a dark puddle shone on the concrete under my bare foot.
The air touched my back where the skin should have been.
The young man folded something into a rag and tucked it in his vest pocket.
Across town it was midnight, and Cian would be watching the clock.
I was not home.
The young man leaned in until his breath touched my ear.
"From now on, you're my little wolf."
It was Da's name for me, and now it was his.
"Tell her the number, boy," the old man said from his chair.
The young man looked me in the eyes.
"Fifteen years, Maeve. That's what your father took from us. You'll pay it down here."
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