The Bureau (A Cage for Men and Wolves Book 1) (8 page)

"Why do you think I started a fire?" The tremor in her voice was subtle, but there.

She could see the moment her intentions to brand her new identification numbers into herself registered with her prisoner and she got the impression his words had been a farce. He looked horrified.

"You're serious?" His voice could hardly be heard over the sound of the fire, which seemed more ominous now.

"I am." Clover turned back to the skirt that she’d started pinning, setting aside the brand, still not ready to face that step. Eventually the weight of his stare became impossible to ignore. "Would you feel more comfortable if I had you do it for me?" she asked, not looking up from her project.

"What?" Elliot seemed offended that she would even ask.

"Well, that's what you people in the Bureau
do
, right?" She continued their game of impartially
-
toned banter, though Elliot seemed less interested in the rules now. "You round up werewolves, torture them for a while, then brand them and ship them off to market."

"We don't
torture
anyone." Elliot had to back-peddle when Clover turned unimpressed eyes on him. "We
interrogate
some of the
criminals
we bring in. And
we
don't do any of the branding."

"And by 'criminals,' you mean 'werewolves’, right?"

"We don't interrogate every werewolf that comes through."

"So what do you do with the ones you don't interrogate?" She knew he was talking his way into a corner.

"If they're not
dangerous,
we send them, unharmed, to a finishing school." He sounded proud, like he was talking about forwarding funds to a charity.

"A finishing school." Clover nodded along with him. "Where they heat up a hot iron and burn numbers into the necks of little kids."

Clover thought she might chip a tooth as she clenched her jaw, images of her kid brother and baby sister being held down and burned filling her head until she felt like drowning. Elliot was silent.

"So let's be honest. Really, it's just that you don't want to get your own hands dirty, right? It's okay as long as it's done in the other room where you don't have to see it happen, or hear them screaming?"

He opened his mouth a few times, only managing to strangle out a "no" and a few other feeble half-sentences before going quiet again.

"You disgust me," Clover said quietly. "You all do."

She looked back down at her skirt, her hands shaking as the branding-iron reflected the fire light into the corner of her eye, taunting her, reminding her that she was more terrified than Elliot would ever realize.

"You're gonna watch this time." Her voice was almost a whisper as she finally began sewing the new hem, glad she had a little more time to prepare herself.

- 09 -

The bruise growing under Clover's teeth, where she was chewing at her own arm to muffle her sobbing, was getting wide and dark. It had been almost an hour since she'd branded her new numbers, 1-2-4-0-1, into the right side of her neck, and the pain had only gotten worse.

Just as she'd promised, she'd left Elliot bound to the couch, determined to make him watch. He'd tried to talk her out of it, which surprised her. He'd seemed so upset by the idea of her torturing herself. He'd seemed
genuine
.

She hadn't been fooled, though, even with his shivering and sweating. Ignoring his insistence that the Bureau doesn't hold prisoners long enough for her to find anyone, Clover had pulled the glowing iron from the fire. The brochure had said the iron was electric and self-heating, but Fisher had left the cord needed for the process out of her parcel. She'd thought he'd done it on purpose so she'd have to do things the old fashioned way. Maybe he'd known that a bit of theatrics would help her cause. Or maybe he was just a sick old man.

"I swear, if you walk away from this now, I won't mention it to anyone," Elliot had actually begged. "You really don't have to do this."

Refusing to let his pleading sway her, she'd focused on the red bit of iron. She would remember the heat it cast on her face for the rest of her life. "Did you ever notice that your neighbor two doors down has an indentured werewolf?" She'd felt strangely detached from the situation, like someone else was driving her body. "I saw him while I was waiting to break into your house. He's like, eight. I could see his numbers from across the street."

She'd set the brand back down in the fire, pulling a leather bit-and-buckle device from the kit. Elliot had been quiet, but she'd heard every heartbeat and every short breath from him as she unfastened the buckle.

"I want you to think of this every time you see him." Her voice had been somber, even in her own ears, as she fit the flat, cushioned, leather bit into her mouth, hooking the buckle around the back of her head where her hair had been tied out of the way.

Elliot's panic had peaked again as she'd leaned her head onto her embroidered chopping block that once had been a chair. Then the brand was in her hands again. She still couldn't remember picking it up. With each breath, the room had seemed to get quieter until the only sound she heard was her heart.

Clover wiped her face with the dingy bathwater, the muffled sound of her own scream echoing inside her head. Her tears had dried, but the trauma had started a subtle quaking in her shoulders that she still couldn't stop. She would have to face her captive sooner or later, but as long as she wasn't crying, she figured her pride would be spared. 

The extra clothes she'd brought from home defeated the purpose of her bath. They were filthy, but she wasn't ready to wear her uniform, and borrowing anything from her prisoner was out of the question. Too sore to give more than a passing concern for the state of her clothes, she stumbled her way to the kitchen where she filled a bag with ice for her neck. She felt dizzy and sick. A clear, plastic cling-bandage had been included with the kit, and she was relieved to find that it was pre-medicated with a subtle numbing agent. Without the distraction from her injury, she might have been surprised. It was more humane than she'd expected. According to the brochure it helped the healing process, but left the numbers visible for immediate identification.

Finally, she moved back into the sitting room, settling in the chair she'd used as a butcher block. She knew her eyes were red and swollen, but Elliot stayed quiet. Near his feet she saw the branding iron, the carpet around it scorched. She remembered throwing it, but hadn't seen where it landed. It had been a reflex. And when she looked more closely, she saw small tags of flesh hanging off the numbers of the brand, and suddenly, Elliot's grey face made sense.

She also realized the chair she sat in was now several feet away from the little dents the legs had left in the carpet. She must have thrashed hard enough to move the heavy thing. A lump grew in her throat and threatened to choke her. Her body remembered what she'd done to it, whether her mind was trying to block it out or not.

Neither of them spoke for a long time, but the static tension that had hung between them was also gone. Their silence seemed comfortable, as though the shared experience of brutality had brought them closer together.

"I was surprised." Clover's voice was scratchy from screaming and her words were slurred because of her stopped-up nose. "I figured you'd already have an indentured werewolf."

"I don't really agree with keeping them." His voice was equally subdued.

"Why?"

"My family thinks it’s foolish. Keeping the enemy so close." He seemed to know that she was too tired to lash out at him for his use of the 'E' word. "My brother, Dominic, is particularly bothered by it. He says it's degrading to rely on them."

Clover actually laughed, though it was a tired, disgusted sort of sound. They had enslaved an entire race of people, but it was their
reliance
on them that was the problem. She wondered how someone became so blind to the crimes they were condoning, and enforcing. "Of course. Clearly that's the problem here." 

Another stretch of silence slid between them and Clover realized that her mind, which had been a mess ever since her family’s capture, was blank. It was a relief. The quiet that had nestled into her head, in combination with the smoky smell of the fire and the soft cushions, relaxed her until she was nodding on the edge of sleep.

"It's not going to be easy to find your family." Elliot's voice was masterfully neutral. "How are you going to do it?"

"I dunno," she admitted, then pushed herself to her feet. "That's your job to figure out. Come on, I'll get you set up somewhere other than the bathroom for the night."

Clover had lost her urge to make Elliot suffer, and didn't figure having him sleep on a tiled floor would serve much of a purpose any more. Using the kitchen shears again, she clipped the zip ties from his ankle and led him upstairs, barely holding onto his arm. After letting him change out of his stained shirt and clean himself up in the bathroom she, bound one of his hands to the headboard so he could sleep in relative comfort. For herself, she retrieved a fluffy, spare comforter she'd found on the top shelf of his closet and settled on the plush carpet.

"I'm your prisoner, but you're the one sleeping on the floor?" Elliot asked once the lights had been shut off.

"I'm used to sleeping on the floor." Her eyes refused to open again. "Besides, we'd both be disgusted if I used your bed."

Elliot didn't disagree.

- 10 -

It had been strange, that morning, for Clover to see her completed disguise. Her uniform was still loose fitting, and she had to stuff the toes of her shoes with tissue to make them fit, but the overall effect was acceptable. Her face was clean from her bath and she'd managed to tame her hair into a relatively neat bun. Save for the shining bandage covering her new, throbbing numbers, she looked like any other indentured wolf she'd passed on the street.

Still, her heart raced as they walked through the ever-expanding crowd, the pedestrian traffic getting heavier the further into the city they traveled. By the time they made it to the subway, Clover felt faint. They were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the train car, and she was certain a hand would reach through the crowd at any moment to yank her into custody.

"You should calm down," Elliot said quietly, breaking through her internal panic. "Just keep your eyes on the floor. People will think you're being cheeky if you look at them."

Elliot stood facing her where they'd been pushed into a corner of the train, looking right at home in his starched uniform, decorated with a white shoulder pad that communicated something Clover didn't understand. She was shocked to hear him giving her what seemed to be genuine advice, but figured he knew better than she did what behavior was acceptable from an indentured wolf.              

She'd been surprised that morning with his complacency, and was relieved, since she didn't have the option of keeping him bound while they were at the Bureau. She still didn't trust that it was real, but aside from his small outburst regarding his now missing laptop, he'd been very easy to handle.

Ignoring what Elliot had said, despite recognizing the good advice, she took inventory of the other indentured wolves that were present. The majority were girls, though she caught site of a young boy toward the end of the crowd, his tan blazer barely peeking through the sea of bodies. Elliot had been right. Every one of them had their eyes on the floor, or at least not on the faces of the people around them. Moving from one to another she hoped she wouldn’t see anyone she recognized. By the door, she saw a girl with a deep purple bruise swelling her eye shut, her lip puffy and scabbed where it had split. That was almost as bad as seeing someone she knew.

Clover swallowed, reminding herself that a swollen face was probably the mere tip of a violent iceberg. Beside the fear she felt, there was another feeling that made her shift uncomfortably in the itchy fabric of her new uniform. Shame. The beginnings of the embarrassment she would have to deal with if she were seen by a pack-mate made her body shake. Her face felt hot and she didn't realize she'd begun to breathe so hard until Elliot grabbed hold of her arm, squeezing tightly, pulling her around to face him again.

"What are you doing?" he asked in an urgent whisper. "People are staring."

With a nonchalance that surprised Clover, Elliot looked at a man in a grey business suit to their left and shook his head.

"She's still new." He sounded believably annoyed.

The grey-haired man nodded. "I swear, some of these schools aren't breaking them in the way they used to."

"I'll probably file a complaint." Elliot matched the older man's tone. "This one has caused me nothing but trouble."

Clover felt the nervous heat inside her flare up into anger, but reminded herself that this was the role she had to play.

"I've heard that some schools are providing shock collars now to help with behavioral problems," the business man said as he tilted his head up to see over a few heads as the train shuttered to a stop.

"Thank you, I'll look into that."