The Bureau (A Cage for Men and Wolves Book 1) (21 page)

"El—" She felt her throat constrict around his name and hoped that the private reprimand she gave herself didn't show on her face. "My master had extra work to do." She felt her face heat up. No slave would call their master by his first name. It was a stupid mistake brought on by the confusion Rainer was stirring up in her.

A look of disgust clouded Rainer’s smug features, though, and Clover thought he may have interpreted her mistake differently. Clover realized that her blush could have been like the color in Hannah's cheeks the day she'd confessed her feelings for her master's son. Without many other options, she decided to pursue that route, and looked at her bound hands, feigning bashfulness.

"And he gave you permission to wander around without supervision?"

Clover was surprised that he ignored her bating, but was more surprised that he didn't ask about the work that would bring her and Elliot into the Bureau on a weekend. He wasn't going to ask her about the data?

"You think he needs to supervise my trip to the toilet?" Clover could hear the bite in her own voice. His skirting of the issues was prodding her temper. She was tired of him dancing around what she knew he wanted, and this less-frightening version of Rainer was making it difficult for Clover to hide her annoyance.

Rainer wet his lips with his tongue, and she thought for a second that he was doing it to hide a grin as he closed the folder. "Well, I suppose it doesn't really matter. Considering we have your transgressions on film, I don't even
need
a confession from you at all. When we show this footage at your hearing, I'm certain even the most lenient of judges will have you severely punished, if not destroyed all together."

"Hearing?" Clover spat the word out before she'd even thought about it.

"That's right. I already have the date. Two and a half weeks from today. Just a few days before the full moon. No sense in having to deal with another one of your transformations if we can help it, after all. Until then, you'll be staying in custody. Do you have anything else to say? Anything you want the judge to hear?"

Clover knew her mouth was hanging open. Custody? For two and a half weeks? She'd already wasted more time than she had to spare, and now she was going to be stuck inside the bureau, inside that cell, for two and a half weeks? A rock fell into the pit of her stomach, pinning her down to the chair.

"If you have nothing to say, then this is the end of our session." Rainer listed the date and some case numbers at the end of the recording, but Clover was too distracted to listen to any of it.

The devastated part of her brain thought she should say something as he packed the camera away. She should plead to be released. Maybe she could promise to come to the hearing so long as she was left in Elliot's care. But then Rainer settled back in his seat, and she finally saw the real man sitting in front of her, all of his hostility bare on his face. She felt her body shrink away from him, even as she willed it to hold its ground.

"Now that we have that formality behind us, I think we should talk about what's really important here, Clover." His voice, which had seemed uninterested moments ago made Clover's mouth go dry now. "When I said that you'll be staying in 'our custody,' what I meant was that you'll be staying in
my
custody. We have a lot to talk about after all."

The fire that had been burning inside her since her fight in the hall was suddenly gone, smothered by the weight of his words. 

"I'm going to start by requesting a full copy of your records. Which shouldn't be anything to worry about if everything you've told me is true. But for now I'm going to send you back to your cell." His mouth twisted into a smile. "You should get some rest. We have a long road ahead of us."

- 20 -

With nothing else to do, Clover paced her cell again—had been for several hours. Rainer had left her in the interrogation room after dropping the news of the hearing on her, and when the other agents had come to return her to her cell, they had subdued her with the collar again, even though she'd not moved a muscle to resist them. She had been dumped unceremoniously back into the dank, foul smelling room, and now she wondered if this was where she'd spend her two and a half week sentence.

Trembling arms folded over Clover's stomach as she thought of what he might find in the files he'd promised to request. Why hadn’t Fisher given her a full copy of her records? She couldn’t help but think the man had done it on purpose—he was feeling more and more like a scoundrel every day.

Maybe Elliot would find a way to get her out before her interrogator even got his hands on her fictional dossier. The idea that Elliot would pluck her out of the mess she'd made was still alive inside her, but floundering. Now that legal action had been taken against her, she wasn't sure what, if anything, he'd be able to do. She glanced at the camera again, worried for a second that it could read her mind.

Despite the
hope
that he would come for her, she knew that she couldn't rely on him. The only person she could trust unwaveringly was herself, and sitting around hoping to be rescued, was an insult to her own strength. Her hands moved with purpose to her shock collar, feeling for a seam or any other flaw she could exploit in an attempt to remove it. There was nothing.

Using her growing hunger as a clock, Clover guessed she spent the next two or three hours scouring every inch of the cell wall she could reach. She wasn't sure what she was looking for. She just needed something,
anything
that told her that room wasn’t impenetrable. 

Eventually, exhaustion and hunger won out and Clover sank to the floor, her back against the damp wall. There had been nothing promising—a few cracks in the cinder block, but nothing loose or hollow sounding. She'd thought the perforated grate that ran the length of the ceiling could be useful, but it was too high. Even jumping from the toilet had left several feet between her fingers and the top of her cell. She felt foolish knowing that her captors had watched every second of her desperate search through the lens of the camera. She knew
she'd
be laughing if the tables had been turned.

Pulling her legs up closer to her body, she tucked her arms against her stomach. Cold seeped out of the moisture on the walls, and when she wasn't in motion she found it hard to keep warm. Her gut hurt, and she tried to estimate how many hours it had been since she'd eaten last. Being hungry wasn’t new to her, but at least when she was with her pack she had the option to try stealing food. She didn’t have that now, and knowing that seemed to make her hunger more acute. She hoped that sleep would help. At the very least she'd have a reprieve from the squirming ache inside her.

The perfect silence of the room felt unnatural, and the collar dug into her neck, but once she was still, her exhaustion caught up with her. As the edges of sleep began to push the hopelessness from her body, she nearly forgot that she was sitting in a cell she may never escape. Then the siren started. In an instant, the small space was filled with a deafening wail that rocked her back against the wall. The air around her felt like it was vibrating, and she clamped her hands over hear ears, curling into her knees to wait out the unbroken howl of the horn.

"Stop!"
She
couldn't even hear her own voice over the noise, which meant that her captors couldn't hear her either.

Using the wall as support, Clover managed to stagger to her feet. The noise shook her bones and made her eyes cross, but before she could signal the camera, the siren shut off. Tentatively, she moved her hands from her ears, though she kept them poised, ready to clamp back down if the noise started again. After a minute or two of silence she dropped them for good.

Thinking the siren may have been keeping time, Clover counted for a while, hoping that understanding the interval would help to explain its meaning, but it didn't go off again. After she'd tired herself with counting, she walked the perimeter of the room again, squinting up at the small holes in the ceiling, thinking she'd be able to see a speaker through them if she could only find the right angle.

Once her body started protesting again, she gave up. Now that she'd had a small taste of sleep, her body was hungry for more of it. It had almost become more appealing than food. Folding her arms over the tops of her knees, she laid her forehead on them. She'd not realized how heavy her head was until she was no longer having to support it.

The persisting silence eased the fear of the siren out of her, and soon she relaxed, the calm of sleep starting to ease her away from the dingy cell again. She was nearly asleep when she heard something disrupt the silence of the space. It wasn't a siren, or even a dangerous noise. It was like the sound the pipes made when she'd used the toilet. Through the fog in her sleep-drunk head it sounded like rain. She thought of her shipping container tower, and the sound of water pattering against the metal walls, then her body was knocked into a fetal position by jets of ice water.

For a few sputtering seconds, as she swirled in the quickly rising water, she thought she'd been jettisoned from the room, thrown out into the worst rainstorm she'd ever seen. Then she realized the bruising columns of water were being shot through the nozzled holes in the ceiling. They struck her body like a falling slab, the pressure holding enough force to knock her off her feet whenever she tried to stand. Eventually, she gave up, keeping her head hung to protect her face. Her back and neck felt bruised, and she was sitting in two feet of water when they finally shut off.

Fingers numb, she clawed for purchase on the wall as she sloshed her way to her feet. Her back was pressed into the corner before she'd realized what she was doing—fear that they were going to drown her making her knees knock against each other. No more water came, and after a few seconds it began to recede into the drain near the toilet. Her heart beat so fast that it hurt, and as tears brimmed her eyes she knew they were just tormenting her.

"What do you want?" She screamed at the camera. When no answer came, she kicked the water over and over, until it had all drained away.

As long as the hours before her interrogation had seemed, the hours following the first deluge felt much longer. Over what she guessed may have been the span of a night—or a day for all she knew—she'd been punished with the siren four more times and assaulted by the icy jets of water five. She'd realized after the second set what her captors true intentions were; they were keeping her awake. When she first realized their intentions, she thought it would be easy to avoid another barrage—all she had to do was stay awake. As the hours passed, though, and as the ache in her stomach intensified, she found the lure of rest too strong. After a few more attempts at stolen moments of sleep, they wouldn't even let her sit.

It felt like she’d been pacing for days when she heard the door click open behind her—she'd been so preoccupied trying to walk a straight line that she'd not heard them coming down the hall. She thought the hunched, shivering stature she had must look pitiful against the stance she'd taken when they'd last come for her. She backed herself toward the corner as the striped agent stepped in with the two other's in his charge. She'd just opened her mouth to tell them she wouldn't fight when he activated her shock collar.

It was almost a relief to be on the floor, even as her body convulsed against the electrical current that subdued her as the guards moved in. The darkness of the bag and the weightlessness gripping hands provided was a welcome repose, and when they ripped the bag from her head, she realized she'd drifted off as they'd dragged her through the halls.

The light in the small interrogation room felt brighter than last time and Rainer already sat across from her, his outline a blur until her senses caught up with her.

"Good morning, Clover." He smiled at her as the agents filed out of the room.

Clover jerked away from him, her body knowing to put as much distance between them as it could, even in her delirious state. She was stopped by the table-top cuffs they’d already fixed her wrists in. She wondered if it was actually morning time. Her body told her she'd been in their custody for longer than the twenty hours he was suggesting. She glanced at the side of the table where the camera had been during their last meeting. The table was bare this time.

"The formal interrogation is over." Rainer said, seeming to notice the way she took stock of the room. "Consider this a
personal
endeavor."

Clover knew what a dangerous prospect that was. Without the camera there, Rainer could effectively do anything he liked. The shot of fear helped to clear her head a bit more, and she sat up straighter, tugging on her bonds, always hoping they'd be defective, and always being wrong.

"Don't look so nervous." Rainer produced an unmarked folder. "To be honest, your records are spotless." He thumbed through the pages, as though to prove he'd actually read them.  "I was disappointed. I'd hoped for a more interesting read." He closed the file again, pushing it to the side of the table.

Clover wasn't sure what she'd expected, but the idea that Fisher had replicated her paperwork well enough that even a top agent like Rainer couldn't tell the difference amazed her, even if he was just a seedy old man.

"I'm sure you're wondering why I didn't ask about Elliot's data during our last meeting, aren't you?" Rainer seemed done with the topic of her records already and was wearing an emotional mask similar to the business man he'd been during their last interrogation. This time his voice was soft, like he wanted her to believe that a soft voice meant a soft heart. "You see, despite what you may think, I worry about my little brother. If he's making some sort of stupid mistake, or if he's being led astray, the last thing I want is to bring him to the attention of the higher-ups. You understand that, don't you? You wouldn't want him being punished for a stupid mistake, right?" He was talking to her like she was a child, and she hated it. "It's
because
I'm so worried about him that I'm going to ask you one more time..." he paused, giving her a chance to think of her answer before he continued. "What do you know about the data my brother's requested?"