Big, scary-looking men surround me.

I blink, trying to clear my vision. It’s hard to do when my eyes are even more swollen than they were when I went to sleep.

Dimly I realize I’m the focal point of a circle of machine guns.

I shoot up to sitting and I’m just about to freeze-frame when a hand slams me back into the couch so hard the wood frame cracks behind my shoulder blades.

I lunge up, and get slammed right back down again.

One of the men laughs. “Kid doesn’t know when to stay down.”

“She’ll learn.”

“Bet your ass she will. If he lets her live.”

“He sure as fuck shouldn’t. Not after what she did.”

“Dani, Dani, Dani.”

I flinch. I’ve never heard anyone say my name so gently. It creeps me all kinds of out.

He’s towering over me, arms crossed over his chest, scarred forearms dark against the rolled-up sleeves of a crisp white shirt. Heavy silver cuffs glint at both wrists. The light is smack behind his head, as usual.

“You didn’t really think I’d let you get away with it,” Ryodan says.

SIX

“I will break these chains that bind me”

“Hurt’s a funny thing,” Ryodan says.

I say nothing. It’s taking all my energy to stand, despite the chains holding me. I’m somewhere in Chester’s, in a room with stone walls. I feel the distant beat of rhythmic bass behind me, in the soles of my feet. If I didn’t have supersenses, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up at all. Because it’s so faint, I know I’m far beneath the public part of the club, probably at the bottom. That means the lower levels didn’t get as badly damaged in the explosion yesterday as I hoped.

They put a bag over my head when they brought me in. Wherever I am, they didn’t want me to be able to find my way back. It’s a logical deduction that they plan to let me live. You don’t bag the head of somebody who’s never going to see anything again. A single low-watt lamp illuminates the room behind him—or fails to. There’s barely enough light to see him standing a dozen feet away.

“Some people fall apart when they get hurt,” he says. “Puddle into apathy and despair and never recover. They wait all their lives for someone to come along and rescue them.” He moves in that strangely fluid way—not freeze-framing but not walking like a Joe either—a ripple of muscle and cascade of wind. Then he’s standing in front of me. “But others … well, they don’t go from hurt to pain. They flash from insult to fury. They raze everything in sight, which usually succeeds in obliterating the very thing that hurt them. However, it causes collateral damage.”

I hang my head so he can’t see the fire in my eyes. “Dude. Bored. If I’d everbeen hurt, I’d give a shit. But I haven’t.”

He pushes the hair out of my face with both his hands, sliding his palms over my cheeks. It takes all I’ve got to conceal a shiver. He forces my chin up. I flash him my best hundred-Megawatt smile.

We lock eyes. I’m not looking away first.

“It didn’t hurt you when your mother left you in a cage like a dog, and forgot you for days while she was off with one of her endless string of boyfriends.”

“You’ve got a seriously wild imagination.”

He grabs a handful of my hair close to the scalp and uses it to keep me from looking away, as if I fecking planned to. When he reaches into one of my coat pockets and pulls out a Snickers bar, my mouth waters. I fought him and his men so hard back at Dancer’s place that I’m drained. I pretend my spine is a broomstick so I don’t sag into the chains holding me to the wall. Pretending is a game I’m good at.

He rips it open with his teeth. I smell chocolate and my stomach hurts.

“How many times did you curl in that cage, chained by a collar around your neck, waiting, wondering if she was going to remember you this time. Wondering what would kill you first: hunger or dehydration. What was it—five days she left you sometimes. No food or water. You slept in your own—”

“You want to shut up now.”

“When you were eight, she died while you were locked up. Rowena didn’t find you for a week.”

That’s the story. I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. Things got real simple in that cage. There are only two things to worry about in life: either you’re free or you’re not. If you’re free, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re not, you kick the shit out of everything around you until you are.

“Sometimes her boyfriends played with you.”

Not that way. Never that way. I’m a virgin and I take it seriously. I’m going to lose it in a really epic way someday, when I’m ready. I’m all about gathering up some fan-fecking-tastic experiences to compensate for the crappy ones I had as a kid. That’s why I wanted to give it to V’lane or maybe Barrons when I was old enough. Someone stellar. I want it to be with someone who will make it a night to remember.

“Are we like swapping philosophies, Ryodan? ’Cause if so, here’s one of mine. Feck you. Past is past.”

“It carves you.”

“Vanishes. Means nothing,” I say.

“You can never outrun it.”

“I can outrun the wind.”

“The wound you refuse to dress is one that will never heal. You gush lifeblood and never even know why. It will make you weak at a critical moment when you need to be strong.”