Page 15 of Possession

When the shock vanishes, I collapse to my hands and knees.

“Fucking animal, you do not touch me, ever!” Briggs shouts as he puts his taser away. “And you”—he points aggressively at Lucas—“can fucking do without!”

He has a bottle of water with him. He uncaps it and pours it out on the floor before storming off and slamming the guardroom door behind him.

It takes me a second to get up. By then, Lucas is at the bars, hands curling around them, staring at the puddle. He yelps in surprise when I grab him then flails as I haul him toward the mattress. As I fall onto it, I take him down with me. Pain flashes in a dozen places, but I don’t care.

Lucas squirms, trying to get away from me, but that is not an option. I haul him close, his back to my front. When he doesn’t quit squirming, I bite the back of his neck and tighten my hold, growling against him. He freezes.

I snug him tighter against me and pull the blanket over us both. I unclamp my teeth and breathe angrily against the back of his head. It has me breathing in his scent.

Half of me wants to thrust him away, to get him out of my bed, but I don’t. He’s not allowed to leave. No one gets to touch him but me.

He grumbles quietly, “I wanted that water.”

I grunt in annoyance. He doesn’t understand the games that men like Briggs like to play. Briggs would never have given him that water. He lured Lucas to the bars with it, but he would only have demanded something else. He would have kept demanding more until he got to something Lucas refused. Then he would’ve poured the water out anyway.

That’s how these things work.

Besides, there’s water in the bathroom. It tastes funny, but it’s fine. I’ve been drinking it for months.

Lucas sighs and starts to settle.

It takes me longer to relax. It’s so strange to feel his body against mine. I haven’t felt anything like it in years. It’s so much stimulation, so unfamiliar. For a long while, I don’t like it, even though I won’t let him go. But eventually, somehow, his weight against me starts to feel good. As the heat builds between our bodies under the blanket, I find myself warmer than I’ve been in months.

After a while, he whispers, “I wish I knew your name.”

It startles me. No one has asked my name in years.

“It’s okay,” he says quickly, obviously having felt my jolt, “I know you don’t talk.”

For some reason, I find myself straining, like words are trying to come out. I actually start shaking with the effort to speak. Or maybe it’s an effort to stop myself from speaking? I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve even remotely wanted to use words.

I’m not a person, and it’s better if I don’t think of myself that way. There’s no point in trying to prove I’m human. There hasn’t been for a long time.

Being a beast is easier. It’s safer.

So why am I trying to answer him?

And what am I even trying to say? Because my name is buried so deep inside me that I don’t know if I could possibly drag it up.

I don’t know if I want to.

SIX

Beast

I’ve decided that I very much like having Lucas in my bed. Sometimes, because my instincts are so tuned to conflict, I get upset when he bumps me. My body interprets every bit of contact that I don’t initiate as attack.

Sometimes I can clamp down on my reaction. Sometimes I can’t.

Usually I just growl until he goes still, but I’ve bitten him a few times. Those are warnings, but last time I bit him hard enough that he yelped and scrambled out of the bed and went to his usual spot. He wouldn’t come back when I clearly indicated that he should, so I had to pick him up and carry him. I’m steady enough now to do that, but he panicked and flailed. I think it tore some of my stitches. I don’t mind. I got what I wanted, which is Lucas’s body against mine.

The sexual nature of my response to him is becoming more obvious. It was hard to recognize at first because it’s been so long since I’ve had a sexual response to anything. I don’t know if it’s a good thing. The stirring in my groin feels way too much like aggression, maybe anger.

I don’t remember that being the case with sex in the past, but I’m not the man I was before I found myself in an Eastern European prison where inmates fought to the death in a walled arena. My instincts now are different. My emotions have less range. I’ve had to cut off every emotion that weakens me or makes me vulnerable, and that’s pretty much left me with anger.

I wasn’t always this way.

---