Page 6 of Caged Bird

My fingers shook at the very thought of Otis out in those woods alone at night, scared, screaming for me, and me unable to help him because I was forever chained inside this hell house.

I couldn’t do that to him. No matter how much I wanted Eddie dead, I wouldn’t sacrifice my child to make it happen.

“You need an ambulance.” I flicked my gaze to the heavy, wrought-iron safe in the middle of the room, where Eddie kept his phone, his guns, his drugs, and the keys to my chains. “I’ll call nine-one-one if you just tell me the code to the safe so I can get the phone.”

He shook his head. “Lying bitch. You think I’m that stupid? You’ll call the police and beg them to come rescue you.”

“I won’t! I promise! I love you!”

I didn’t love him. Not even a little bit. But I would have told him anything he wanted to hear in that moment. I pushed his hands away from the bullet hole and replaced them with my own, plugging the wound and slowing the bleeding. “Eddie, I can’t fix this. You’re going to die if you don’t tell me the code to that safe. You’re going to have to trust me!”

I didn’t need to look into his eyes to know he wouldn’t. To know he would rather us both die here, him from blood loss, me and Otis eventually starving to death painfully.

Tears spilled down my cheeks. “Please, Eddie! Let me help. Tell me the code.”

His jaw clenched into a firm line, his teeth bared, his secrets swallowed whole by the hate inside him.

I despised this man. Loathed him with everything I had.

And yet I kept pressure on his leg. Plugging the artery so he didn’t die.

I wasn’t like him. And I never would be.

Headlights lit up the front yard once more, and I jerked my head up, peering through the window at the truck arriving.

Spider burst in through the door a moment later. “We—”

“Call an ambulance,” I cut him off. “He’s going to die without one.”

Spider stopped and actually stared down at his boss. “You said you were okay!”

“Yeah, well, I’m fucking not. So just call the ambulance, would you?”

Spider pulled his phone from his back pocket. I stared at it longingly, dreaming of snatching it from his fingers and using it to call my family. My friends. The police. Anyone.

Eddie glanced at me then added to Spider, “Get her upstairs, out of sight before you say a word.”

There was no point in trying.

I had no strength to fight a fully grown man. Eddie kept me weak, lacking in energy to do even the simplest of tasks. If that hadn’t been enough, the threat of him hurting the little boy who’d had the unfortunate luck to be born into the middle of all of this would have been enough to keep me silent.

I did nothing when Spider forced me back up the stairs to the bathroom, promising with a wicked glint in his eye that I’d feel the end of his blade if I so much as made a sound when the paramedics arrived. He shoved a gag in my mouth, binding my hands to the exposed pipes beneath the sink with the rope Eddie kept there for exactly that purpose.

Spider closed the door, locked it, and then thundered back down the stairs.

The closet door opened quietly, and I sobbed, the pain and hate all coming out in violent shakes of my shoulders.

Until the little boy I loved more than life itself climbed from a box and put his skinny arms around me. “It’s going to be okay, Mommy.”

But it wasn’t. Nothing had been okay since Eddie had walked into my life.

And nothing would ever be okay again until he was out of it.

2

ZANE

Screams ripped through the night, echoing down the hallway and rattling my brain from sleep.

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