Caged (Savage Men 1)

I wait a few minutes to make sure he’s not coming back before I slowly slip out of my bed and walk up to the glass. Peering through, I can clearly see the woman lying on the bed in the far corner beyond the mysterious man’s cage.

Another captive.

Why is she suddenly here?

Did she come here after me or before me?

And what did he do to her to make her pass out?

Because she’s clearly not awake, judging from the way her face is smashed against the pillow. I wonder if he did the same to her as he did to me when he took me. Just thinking about the awful smell that was inside the cloth pushed against my mouth makes me sick.

But I don’t give into the sensations of wanting to hurl. Instead, I gently tap the glass, hoping to wake her up.

She groans and turns, and my heart does a flip-flop. However, she immediately drops back down onto the bed again, and I hear nothing.

Shit.

She must be completely wiped out.

But then another groan slips from her mouth.

Is she trying to wake up? Maybe she’s fighting the drugs.

I have to help her.

Without thinking, I start banging on the glass, hard.

So hard even my next-door neighbor wakes up. He groans loudly like a bear as he leans up and looks at me with furrowed brows. “Sleep,” he growls.

He’s never spoken more than two syllables to me, but I can tell he’s mad because I woke him up. He shouldn’t be. I need his help. So I point at the window behind him, desperately trying to get him to look.

When he finally does follow my finger, he just shrugs and turns around again.

My jaw drops.

What the …?

I knock on the glass again. He looks annoyed. “What?”

I point at the woman again and make an angry face.

“She’s sleeping.”

She’s not. She’s struggling. She needs help. Wake her up.

Of course, whenever I try to sign, he understands zero of what I’m trying to say.

Why is he completely not interested in the woman right beside him? She’s the first new thing that’s happened to us since I came here, and he seems totally oblivious to her presence. As if he doesn’t care. Or as if he doesn’t feel that it’s special.

But it is. It’s a person. Someone to talk to. Someone who could help me figure out what this place is, and what Graham wants with us. Someone who could help us get out.

But I’m tired of waiting until the stranger beside me does something, so instead, I bang on the glass harder. As hard as I can. I don’t care if it keeps him awake. This is too important. I need to know who this woman is. Why she’s here. If she knows more, anything, I just have to know.

I can’t sleep knowing she’s here. Not without having at least tried to wake her up and get her to talk to me.

But my wrists feel like they’re about to fall off, that’s how painful it is. And Mr. Unknown jumps up from the bed and pounds the glass near me once, his strike so hard that it makes me jump back.

“No …” he growls.

No? What the hell?

Why wouldn’t he want her to wake up? Is he insane?

I frown and make a face. Then I continue to knock anyway. I don’t care if he likes it or not, I’m not stopping until she’s awake.

However, the vents above me suddenly open wide, and a gas filters inside.

I cough, backing away from the glass, and try to escape the gas by rushing to a corner. I cover my mouth and nose with the bed sheets, but as more gas flows inside, it’s becoming harder to breathe.

Shit.

He’s drugging me again.

Mystery man beside me starts punching the glass out of nowhere. And not in an angry way, but as if he’s trying to actually break the glass to get to me.

“NO!” he yells loudly.

My vision is getting blurry as I sit down in the corner of my cell, covering my face with whatever I can find. But it isn’t enough.

I struggle to breathe.

A few seconds later, the lights go out.

Accompanying Song: “The Stray” by Ramin Djawadi

Cage

“No!” I yell as he comes inside her cage and drags her into a wheelchair.

“Silence,” he barks at me.

I frown as he rolls her out of her prison. “Give her back.”

“Don’t you worry about her …” he says as he takes her out of the room and out of sight.

What is he going to do to her?

I don’t want her to get hurt, but I’m so damn scared he might do something to her. Especially after she made so much noise. He must’ve been angry with her. I just hope he won’t take his rage out on her.

The girl in the cage next to me groans, and her eyelids struggle to open. “Where …?”