Page 70 of Tiny's Testament
A laugh rumbles behind me. “Boss wants her awake later. Not now.”
My head lolls forward. The world tilts sideways. “Pearl…” I manage, voice slurred.
She steps back further. Her eyes shine with something between guilt and terror and something uglier, jealousy.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t stop them. She just watches.
I’m thrown into the van, my body hitting cold steel. The door slams, sealing me inside. Then the world collapses into black.
When awareness crawls back, it comes with the sound of metal clanging, echoing, repeating in an endless loop.
My head throbs so violently I almost vomit. My limbs don’t respond at first. They’re weighted and numb. My mouth is dry like I swallowed sandpaper.
The smell hits me next. Bleach sharp enough to burn, iron heavy in the air, something rotten beneath it.
I force my eyes open. Bars resolve into something worse. Chain-link fencing so close it grazes my cheek. The kind used for dog kennels. I push up, muscles trembling, and my hand scrapes concrete.
The concrete beneath me is cold and slick, stained in a way that tells a story I don’t want to know. As my vision clears, the truth settles in with brutal clarity. I’m inside a cage. A real metal kennel built for animals, not people.
Panic spikes through me, and I scramble backward until the chain-link rattles behind me, the sharp metallic sound echoing in the cavernous room.
The space around me stretches huge and dim, shadows pooling in the corners, the air thick with the smell of bleach andold suffering. Rows of kennels line the walls. Some are empty, others holding slumped shapes that were once women. A few sit upright, shaking. Others lie too still. The quiet sobbing from somewhere nearby crawls under my skin.
A chill rolls through me, sinking deep. This isn’t a warehouse. It’s an abandoned animal shelter. A twisted joke. A punishment crafted specifically for Tiny’s heart.
The drugs still cloud my head, but fear cuts through the haze with surgical precision. I push myself upright, gripping the chain-link fencing with unsteady fingers. Something on the concrete wall catches my attention. A carving, crude and deliberate.
A letter. AnL, cut deep enough to break the surface, jagged edges catching the low light.
Lattimer.
My throat tightens painfully as the implications slam into me. Of course, he’d choose a cage meant for discarded creatures, a place built to hold the unwanted and the forgotten. Of course, he’d use me to send Tiny a message meant to break him open.
Tiny saves strays. Tiny protects anything small, helpless, and hurting. Putting me here is Lattimer’s way of sayinghe can’t save this one.
My knees nearly buckle under the weight of it. A sob rises before I can stop it, clawing up my chest, raw and aching. I fold forward, pressing my forehead against the cold chain-link as the metal digs into my skin, grounding me even as it traps me.
I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have followed her. I shouldn’t have let shame make my choices. But none of those mistakes matter as much as the truth that slices deeper than all the rest.
Tiny is going to think this is his fault. And that thought hurts worse than anything Lattimer could do to me.
I drag in a slow, uneven breath, desperate to force air into lungs that feel too tight to hold it. “This isn’t where I die,” I whisper, my voice shaking but refusing to break. “This isn’t it.”
My hands tremble so violently that the chain-link rattles again, echoing in the hollow space. Somewhere across the room, another woman lets out a soft whimper. Somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath the terror and the drugs, I hear the distant memory of a motorcycle engine. Tiny’s bike, steady and familiar, the sound that always meant safety.
I close my eyes, swallowing hard against the panic and the tears burning at their edges.
“Tiny,” I breathe into the dark, voice barely more than air.
“Come find me.”
16
TINY
The blood is still under my fingernails. I washed my hands three times after the scouting mission, but it doesn’t matter. The courier’s fear lingers in my skin, in my bones, in the echo of every blow I kept throwing long after he stopped breathing. I can still hear Trigger yelling at me to stand down. I can still see Dagger grabbing my shoulders, pulling me off what was left of the kid.
Worst of all, I can still see Syvannah watching. Her eyes weren’t afraid of the violence. They were afraid of me.
