Page 26 of Cruel Games

When Dingo came to after the roofie incident, he mentioned he’d been preoccupied looking for a girl he described as fitting the description of the girl we’d met in the hallway where we found him. They assumed the girl wasn’t involved, butthere had to be a reason she found us in the hallway and didn’t say anything.

I doubted it was as simple as it looked.

But as usual, I said nothing, content to let them hash it out all night on the couch.

When they finally got up and disappeared into their rooms, I snuck back to mine and pulled out the old, worn-down copy of Shakespearean sonnets I’d borrowed from St. Clair when I arrived. She’d seen me struggling to fill out my forms–will and testament in case I died on the job, background info, and basic identifying stuff. I had written half of my own name and stopped because I hadn’t written it in so long, I’d forgotten what letters came first.

She took pity on me and told me that even the great writers of our times had trouble with words here and there. Shakespeare was the king of chopping words in half and then smashing two together to get his point across. Her words reminded me of my mother, what little of her I could remember. Ever since then, I’d been using his work to practice because I never wanted to be looked down on again.

The couch’s old, cracked leather bit into my skin as I leaned against it, wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants slung low on my hips, but I paid it no mind, clearing my throat to prepare to butcher the Old English verses.

“When I consider everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment—Jesus, what does this even mean?”

Frustrated, I flipped the book over in my hands as if I would find the answers written on its leather-bound spine. Yet, despite my frustrations, it did not give up its secrets, determined to force me to parse these things out on my own.

I turned the book back over, thumbing the edge of the page as I studied the words, determined not to stutter this time.

“That this huge stage . . . presenteth . . . nought but shows, whereon the stars in secret . . . influence comment . . .”

I shook my head like a confused dog who’d sniffed a snout-full of ground pepper.

Who in their right mind reads this shit for fun?

Surely there were more interesting, more understandable, simpler texts one could read for enjoyment. This felt . . . like torture.

Still, there was a sort of . . .melodyto the words that felt like a spoken song. It soothed your soul in a way you couldn’t entirely explain, like the first rays of sunlight over the horizon or the first buds of spring.

Shakespeare, it seemed, was rubbing off on me.

I read through another two or three lines and then set the book down, already fed up with whatever flowery shit this man had decided was worth writing about. I’d come back to it when my brain felt like cooperating with the intense prose that felt like another language entirely. It was like suffering through English lessons when I was a child. I’d been raised speaking six languages, but they all felt foreign coming from my tongue when I was dragged out of the wilderness. I’d abandoned my human tongues in favor of the only language the wild animals understood—howls, snarls, and barks.

It had served me well out there. In civilization, not so much.

“Fuck Shakespeare,” I spat angrily, tossing the book on the couch behind me. The fridge beckoned, as I’d skipped my meal earlier, and my stomach was well on its way to eating itself from the inside out in an effort to sustain me. I knew Jackal had made something earlier and mentioned leftovers, but depending on what it was, it might already be gone.

Bathed in the little light from the interior, I scrounged up what vaguely resembled some sliced meat, a loaf of bread, and a piece of cheese, all in edible condition. Slapping a sandwich together was easier than reading through a damn sonnet, at least, and I rushed through the mundane, habitual task almost half asleep, my mind elsewhere.

On the girl.

I’d seen many girls in my life, even felt a few up when we lived on the streets. They were always eager to see if the feral boy fucked like a wild animal. But to their disappointment, I was no more interested in fucking than I was in re-enrolling in school. They quickly abandoned the awkward boy they thought would give them a taste of the wild side in favor of the ruthless youth who’d fallen from his gilded cage and damn near broken his neck in the escape–Jackal.

Jackson King. Heir to a fucking fortune, with a family who put him on a pedestal and turned him into their dancing monkey. His father dragged him out to show off after returning from prep school, and his mother paraded hosts of pretty girls in front of him to tempt another wealthy family to donate their daughter to the cause and unite more fortunes under their family name.

He’d never been one for all the attention. And that carried over to the day his sister was found dead in the streets, covered in tire tracks and barely identifiable, bloody and mangled and bruised, with her panties around her ankles in a shameful display of blatant mockery.

The men who left her there like that, the men who used her like their own personal doll, and then threw her out when she refused to dance for them, became his targets. He dropped out of college, found me, and his cause became our cause.

When his family turned their backs on his nefarious designs, they closed the door to fortune and fame for him. Suddenly, we were on our own in a harsh world that spared none of the pain and suffering she doled out in equal measure.

A steadytick, tick, tickechoed in the dim silence of the room behind me as my eyes were drawn to the small, grimy window above the sink. It looked out on the back lawns just beyond the fire escape, and I let myself dream of the days I could run free, no cares in the world buthunt, kill, eat, move, sleep, repeat.Animals in the wild didn’t worry about their neighbors, or whether their bikes were still coated in blood from their last kill. They knew their enemies, possessed habits born from generations of inherited memories, and owed no loyalty to any but their own kind.

Humans, by design, were deceitful creatures, bred for a different type of survival. In the world they resided in, the society they’d built, secrecy, lies, and perception were of the utmost importance. Honesty, loyalty, and teamwork were words they had to be taught. And those with money had the morals of a rock. They preyed on the weak to make themselves stronger.

At least when nature preyed on the weak, she preyed on the strong with equal measure.

Humanity was a rotten breed, and until the other night, I’d never wanted to get to know a single soul outside the ones I was closest to.

But that girl, in those strange stockings, the boots that were made for running, and that top strategically cut to present her assets, much like a peacock’s feathers or a songbird’s melody . . .

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