He Caged Me for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fifteen Marks

Maeve wakes in a steel cage beside a wall of fifteen scratch marks, bites Niall as he resets her shoulder, and hears Fergus's men claim her; Niall says she is his, and Fergus says the first night she leaves the cage she goes to the table.

I woke on a cot with my face turned to a concrete wall.

My back was wrapped in gauze that was already soaked through.

My right arm hung off my shoulder at the wrong angle, and every breath sent a hot wire down it.

The bare bulb was still on.

A steel gate stood across the front of the room, and beyond it I could see a washer, a dryer and a staircase.

It was a cage built into a cellar.

Someone had made it for a person, with a drain in the floor and a bucket in the corner.

Next to my head, scratched into the wall, were marks.

They ran in bundles of five, each bundle crossed by a slash.

I counted them twice.

Fifteen.

The gate opened.

The young man with the green eyes came in and shut it behind him, and he did not lock it.

"Your shoulder's out," he said. "I'm putting it back."

"Stay away from me."

"Then it stays out, and by tonight you'll be sick from the pain."

I said nothing, and he took that for a yes.

He knelt by the cot and set one hand flat against my collarbone and the other around my wrist.

"Bite down on this."

He held out a folded towel.

I took his hand instead.

I bit the heel of it as hard as I could, and tasted blood.

He did not pull away.

He pushed my arm up and back in one slow movement, and my shoulder dropped into its socket with a thud I felt in my teeth.

I screamed into his skin.

When I let go, he looked at his hand.

The marks of my teeth were deep and red. He wiped the blood on his jeans.

"Good," he said. "You bite. That's useful."

"What is that wall?"

"A calendar."

"Of what?"

"My father's sentence." He tipped his chin at the marks. "One for every year he did. I came down here on his anniversary and scratched one."

"Who is your father?"

"Fergus Caffrey." He watched my face. "I'm Niall. You'll want to remember both."

The name meant nothing to me, and I said so.

"No," Niall said. "It wouldn't."

He stood.

"Fifteen years ago your father stood up in a courtroom and swore my father killed a man. He was lying. My father went to prison, and your father got his seat."

"My father is Wolf Callister."

"He is."

"He's the president because the club voted for him."

"They voted for him because the man they'd had was in a cell."

"You're lying."

"Ask him," Niall said. "Next time you see him."

He opened the gate.

"Come upstairs. Fergus wants to look at you in daylight."

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

"You can walk up, or I can carry you. Your back won't like the second one."

I stood.

The cellar swung and settled.

I climbed the stairs with one hand on the rail, and he stayed one step behind me the whole way, close enough that I felt it.

The kitchen was bright and smelled of coffee.

Five old men sat around a long table in cuts that had faded from black to grey.

At the head of it, in a wooden chair, sat the man who had watched me get cut.

In daylight he was thinner than I remembered, with white stubble and a cane hooked over the chair back.

His eyes were the same green as his son's.

"Wolf's girl," he said. "Come where I can see you."

I stayed where I was.

"I said come."

"I heard you."

One of the old men laughed.

Fergus did not.

"You've got his mouth," he said. "Good. I wanted her to have his mouth."

"My father will find you."

"Your father knows exactly where you are."

I looked at him.

He drew on his cigarette and said nothing more, and that was worse than if he had.

"She's Wolf's," said the old man on his right. "Wolf took fifteen years of my brother's life. I say the club takes it back out of her tonight."

Every man at the table understood what he meant.

My stomach turned over.

"No," Niall said.

He did not raise his voice.

He stepped past me and stood between the table and my back.

"She's mine," he said. "I cut her. I'm the one who carries the fifteen, and nobody here touches what I'm carrying."

The old man started to stand.

"Sit down," Fergus said, and the old man sat.

Fergus looked at his son for a long moment.

Then he looked at me, at the gauze on my back, at my torn right arm and my bare feet on his kitchen floor.

"All right," he said. "She's his. She sleeps in the cage."

He tapped the ash from his cigarette into a saucer.

"And the first night she's out of it, boy, she belongs to the table."

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