The Bureau (A Cage for Men and Wolves Book 1) (20 page)

As the two agents closed in on her dead end, her body made the decision for her. Flattening herself against the wall near the last turn she'd been forced to make by the un-splitting hallway, she waited for the first hint of black uniform to breach the side. Immediately, she had one of the agents by his collar, the heel of her hand driving up against the man's nose. Blood coated Clover's palm as the agent's legs crumpled underneath him, then she turned to his partner. He staggered back as she launched herself at him, grabbing his hair and using her bodyweight to teeter him off his feet.

For a second she knew she should run—they weren't down for good, but they were distracted enough that she could make another attempt at escaping. It would at least put enough distance between them that she could try finding the door again. Instead, she punched the floored agent in the eye. A new kind of anger rose up in Clover as she hit him again. She wanted him to suffer. She wanted him to pay for the girl on the train, for Ji-Yung and her infected leg, for Isaac. She hit him again for every one of the people she'd seen suffering since she'd left her home.

The agent underneath her had already stopped fighting back when she realized she'd made the wrong choice. As she brought her fist back for one more hit, she heard, as much as felt, the electrical buzzing charge the air around her, then pain erupted from the small of her back. She'd felt the initial heat as the barbed dart pierced her skin, but before she could even flinch, every muscle in her body seized. Her back bowed in an arch away from the man she knelt over and she thought if she bent any further her spine would break. Then she was on the ground, pain blacking her vision and wracking her body with convulsions. She was unconscious before it stopped.

- 19 -

Clover's nose was the first part of her body to wake up, and it was immediately overpowered by the smell of bleach. The soft tissues in her sinuses burned, but as she opened her eyes she saw a room much grimier than the smell had suggested. She ached all over, felt bruises she didn't remember getting, but the two strips of constant pain that ran along either side of her spine were the worst. Then she remembered the Track-Taser. With a bit of effort, she moved her hand to the epicenter of the cramping muscles and was relieved to find only a small cut—the barb and its tracker had been removed while she was unconscious.

As the fear of having to remove the barb herself subsided, it became easier to give attention to some of the duller aches in her body. She swallowed around the dry hollow her throat had become and felt a jabbing sensation against her neck. It wasn't necessarily painful, but constricting and she didn't need to touch it to know that it was a collar. Moving against the weight that still hung on her limbs, her fingers felt for a buckle, but found nothing—it was a solid metal ring with two prongs that pressed against her skin on the inside lip. She dropped her hand again, too hurt to care more than that.

She laid still for a long time. After only a preliminary glance at the room, she knew where she was. She was in a cell. Once she acclimated herself to the pain, she forced herself to sit up. The space was roughly ten feet squared with a high, flat ceiling dotted by small holes. There was no bed, only a soiled looking metal toilet in the corner. Clover felt her stomach turn at the thought of being trapped long enough to use it. Set in one wall was a door like the ones in the evaluation hall, though it lacked the coat of white paint that made his look clean or a window. Above the door was a blank television screen embedded behind what she knew must be a protective Plexiglas. Inside the same clear barrier she saw the tiny dot of a camera lens.

With a little more effort, she managed to stand, limping to the wall to steady herself. It was damp and over the stench of cleaner, she could now smell hints of mildew and something vaguely fecal. A shiver of disgust ran up her aching spine when she realized the cleaner probably hadn't been used to get rid of filth, but to get rid of evidence. Like a knee-jerk reaction, she pulled her hand away from the wall, the moisture feeling like blood under her fingers now. She wiped it on her shirt, then checked the door, some part of her desperately hoping it would be unlocked.

Unsure of what to do, but filled with nervous energy, she paced the filthy perimeter of the room, trying not to look down into the metal bowl of the toilet. The water in it was low and cloudy and the sides of the bowl were coated with a black film—so much for having a source of drinking water if they refused to supply anything.

She rubbed her sore knuckles as she lost count of the laps she'd made. They still felt heated by the bruised flesh of the agent she'd beaten, and she wondered how many of the bones in his face were broken. Not-too-subtly, she hoped the answer was 'all of them'.  The righteous high she'd felt when she had that agent on the ground stoked the furnace of her anger, burning it hotter than the incinerator that reduced her people to ash. She was waiting like a caged monster for someone to come inside to fetch her. She
wanted
them to come for her, because she wanted to make sure they wouldn't walk out of the cell. She would make them suffer the same way the werewolves who had sat in this cell before her had probably suffered.

With each pass along the back wall, Clover glared into the small aperture of the camera, daring them to come for her. Only briefly did she think of Elliot. The loneliness she'd felt in the Evaluators' mass of cubicles burbled like a drown child in the back of her mind, but was silent otherwise. Elliot had been wrong when he'd said they had to work within the system. She didn't need the system. She needed revenge for what they'd done to her family—for what they’d done to all of them.

It was impossible to tell what time it was, or how long she'd been there, but her stomach was telling her it was almost dinner. It had been maybe two in the afternoon when she'd wandered into the hall. As her stomach growled, she thought of Elliot again; wondered if he knew she was missing yet. He'd still been working hard to help her, which meant that he still believed she held the only key to saving his humanity. That also meant that he would be doing what he could to get her out. Maybe she could wait this out if nobody came for her.

As her legs ached from hours of pacing, Clover compiled a list of her offenses. Assuming no one knew she was a renegade posing as a slave, her list wasn't very long. She'd be in trouble for wandering somewhere she shouldn't have, and for assaulting two guards. Maybe her list didn't need to be long to be serious. How many indentured werewolves went around beating up Bureau agents?

Eventually, when her body was telling her that it must be the middle of the night, she heard a distant scraping of metal-covered boot tips. Clenching her fists, she stood with her back against the far wall, her feet spread to shoulder width to stabilize herself. Resisting would only be added to her list of infractions, but the sound had breathed life into the flame inside her again.

When the door opened, three agents stepped inside. Clover recognized none of them, but they seemed to know her intentions, because none of them moved.

"You'll come with us," the agent in the middle said matter-of-factly. He had a single red stripe across his shoulder guard, showing that he was on his way to becoming an officer—probably in charge of the two agents who flanked him.

Clover didn't speak, but they seemed to understand her answer when she squared her shoulders. For a second she saw the lower ranking agents exchange glances, and she felt a rush of pride as she realized they were wary of approaching her. Then their leader raised his hand, pointing what looked like a small remote control at her. Instantly, the air was forced from Clover's body as a charge of electricity jumped from her collar into her neck, down her spine, freezing her limbs and crumpling her to the ground.

While the electrical charge seemed less powerful than the jolt she'd gotten from the Track-Taser, she was still paralyzed. It was impossible for her to even take a breath, and her teeth clenched so hard that she thought they might crack. As she lay helpless she watched two sets of boots move to either side of her. Just as their hands were clamping onto her arms and legs, the collar shut off, leaving Clover gasping for breath and unable to fight them as they cuffed her hands behind her back and covered her head with a dark, rank smelling bag.

They dragged her by force until she managed to get her feet properly under herself, and as seconds turned into minute she found it impossible to tell where they were in relation to the cell she'd been in. She thought the extra turns might have been intentional, wanting to disorient her. Vaguely, she thought it was funny, like they assumed she'd want to find her way back to that horrible, damp room.

A door scraped opened in front of her and then she was being squeezed into what she thought must be a tight space as she bumped back and forth between the two guards who all at once seemed crowded around her. Then she was forced into a chair. The bag came off her head as they were locking her hands into the metal rings attached to the top of a table.

Clover had to squint her eyes against the bright light of the room. Unlike the cell she'd been in, this room was pristinely tiled in white, the surface of the metal table polished to a mirror-like finish. She was still blinking against the ache in her eyes as all three of the guards left the room.

Alone, she looked around the cramped space which was barely wider than the table, only leaving a few feet on every side. She saw no TVs, no cameras. After an initial tug at the cuffs, she abandoned the hope of escaping them. They were so snug she could barely uncurl her fingers, and they were bolted to the table top. Expecting the man with the controls to her collar to come back any second, she tried to keep still. She may not be able to fight them while she wore the dehumanizing collar, but she could fight them another way. She would play the perfect slave. She could say she'd gotten lost, wandered into the hallway by accident, and then attacked the guards out of fear. It probably wouldn't get her off the hook, but it would buy Elliot the time he needed to find her.

As the door scraped open, any plan she had concocted seeped out of her. The striped agent didn't return. Instead, Rainer stepped into the room, looking taller and more imposing in the small space than he did even on the streets. He was an animal no matter where he was, but now she was caged with him.

"Hello, Clover," he said as he took the seat across from her, setting a small bag on the table next to him.

Clover didn't speak, her throat too dry to make noise even if she’d tried. She should have seen this coming, but somehow thought that interrogating slaves who had wandered too far from their masters would be work that was below him. Of course, she also knew that he'd taken an interest in her and her relationship with his brother, so surprise should have been out of the question. 

At first, Clover thought he looked uninterested as he began unpacking a tripod and a strange looking camera. It had two separate lenses, each pointing at different angles. As he set it at the side of the table, she realized it would film both her and her interrogator at the same time, and as she watched him turn it on, she noticed that behind the disinterest, she saw a ghost of satisfaction in the slightest quark of his mouth.

"Dominic Rainer, interrogating number 1-2-4-0-1, Clover Rhodes. Session one." Rainer spoke to the camera only, his eyes focused on a small folder he'd unpacked as well, skimming the lines that Clover couldn't read. "You understand why you're here?"

Clover felt a slight comfort knowing that there was a camera watching their interaction, though she wasn’t convinced that anyone watching would care even if he
did
become violent.

"No." Her voice was shaking more than she'd realized, her body still trying to reroute the dump of adrenaline his presence always caused.

Rainer laced his fingers together and considered her with a mockery of confusion on his face. "You put two men in the hospital and you don't know why you're here?"

A small thrill of accomplishment banished some of her fear as she heard that her assailants had been hospitalized. There was no guilt.

"I'm going to cut straight to the chase. What were you doing in that hallway?"

There was something different about him, something missing that had been present in the empty office and even in Elliot's town home. The deep seated fear she usually felt in his presence was evaporating, and she guessed it had to do with his overly business-like manner. She thought this was the man he projected to the rest of the Bureau, and probably to his father. To them he was a man who was level headed and patient, who lacked the explosive temper and genocidal interests that she had seen in him.

"I was lost."

"You were lost? Down a high-security hallway outside of the facility's normal hours of operation?"

"Yes."

"And while you were lost, you decided to assault two of our agents?"

"They were trying to hurt me." Clover hoped she sounded at least a little helpless.

"I've watched the footage of the attack, Clover."

Clover felt her fingers go cold and her eyes dropped to the table. They had footage of the chase? Of the attack? She felt foolish for having assumed there were no cameras in the hallway just because she couldn't see them. When she dared a glance at him again she saw a hint of smugness in the line of his mouth.

"Tell me, what were you doing inside the building outside of business hours?" He asked finally.