Page 7 of Heresy
Every decision from this moment determines whether she leaves breathing.
But something about those defiant eyes suggests this conversation won't follow familiar patterns. Won't reduce itself to simple predator-prey dynamics.
Maybe that's what makes her dangerous. Maybe that's what makes her interesting.
Maybe those are the same thing.
THREE
THE FIRST CAGE
VERA
His words hang in the air like smoke from a funeral pyre, dense with finality. "Now I have to decide if you do, either."
My mind, which had been a screaming whirlwind of panic, goes utterly and completely silent.
The shift is violent, instantaneous—like stepping from chaos into a vacuum where sound dies and thought crystallizes into perfect, terrifying clarity. This isn't a threat. Threats are promises of future violence, negotiations where survival remains possible, bargaining chips in games where both sides acknowledge the other's humanity. This is something else entirely. A calm statement of fact delivered with the clinical precision of someone announcing weather conditions or stock prices.
He is not deciding whether to hurt me. He is deciding whether I am a person at all.
My lungs forget their function, oxygen becoming a theoretical concept trapped somewhere between throat and sternum—a useless bubble of pain that expands against my ribs without offering relief. The corrugated steel wall seeps industrial cold through my thin jacket, penetrating fabric and flesh withmechanical persistence until the chill settles into my bones like winter made permanent. Metal ridges press into my spine through cotton and fear, each groove a reminder that even this wall has more substance than my current claim to existence.
I wait for the sharp sting of a bullet. The cold kiss of a blade. I wait for my world to end.
But he doesn't move. A statue carved from shadow and violence, he simply watches me with eyes that reflect nothing—not anger, not satisfaction, not even basic recognition of shared humanity. The silence between us stretches taut as piano wire, vibrating with tension that threatens to snap something essential inside my chest. The two men behind him—the ones who hunted me through shipping container canyons with the methodical patience of wolves—have transformed into stone gargoyles guarding gates that lead nowhere good.
The waiting is the torture.
He wants me to feel this moment of absolute powerlessness, to understand with cellular certainty that every breath I take exists only through his permission. Each heartbeat is borrowed time, each blink an act of mercy he can revoke without warning or explanation. My heart hammers frantic, useless percussion against my ribs—a desperate bird in a cage of bone that doesn't understand the bars are constructed from his will rather than steel.
The sound seems impossibly loud in the alley's steel-wrapped silence, each beat a countdown toward whatever verdict he's reaching in the calculating darkness behind those empty eyes. Time becomes elastic, seconds stretching into geological epochs while I catalog what might be my final sensory experiences: salt air carrying stories of distant oceans, diesel fumes thick as syrup, the metallic taste of fear coating my tongue like copper pennies dissolved in saliva.
The smell of motor oil and something else—something organic and wrong, like rust mixed with old blood.
After an eternity that lasts only heartbeats, he gives a short, almost imperceptible nod to the men behind him. The gesture is economical, precise—a CEO approving quarterly reports or a surgeon indicating the next incision. Nothing personal. Nothing heated. Just business conducted with the efficiency of someone who has made this decision before.
The sentence has been passed. The jury of one has reached its verdict.
I just don't know what it is.
The nod is a release.A command. The machinery of my capture grinds into motion. The two men move in terrifying synchronization. One is cold, efficient, with eyes like a winter morgue. The other radiates violence like heat off summer asphalt.
The cold one reaches for my camera—my shield, the last piece of me that feels real. My fingers spasm, a desperate, useless command from a brain no longer in control. His grip is steel wrapped in flesh. He plucks the Nikon from my grasp like it's nothing.
No rush. No urgency. Predators who have already won.
He passes it to his brother without a glance. My life's work has been reduced to an inventory item. The dismissal cuts deeper than a blade.
Then the angry one has my arms. His fingers are talons in my biceps, a promise of bruises that will bloom like poisonous flowers. A promise that I am no longer a person. I am a possession.
Animalistic panic whites out my vision. The primal scream to fight—to claw, to bite, to do anything—floods my system.
But another voice cuts through the noise. Colder. Quieter. The one that has kept me breathing for two years. The one that teaches survival.
Don't fight, it commands, the clarity forged in blood. You can't win. Watch. Remember.
So I do. My body goes limp, a dead weight. Psychological jujitsu. While my muscles surrender, my mind becomes a lens, zooming in. The smell of stale smoke on his leather, incense from an altar of destruction. The specific design of a skull tattoo on the other's neck—a story told in ink and pain.
