Page 184 of Cobra
“Rules keep money clean.”
“Nothing about this money is clean.”
“No,” the tablet man says. “But it spends just the same.”
I stare at myself in the mirror and try not to disappear. My face looks wrong. Makeup too perfect. Eyes too wide. Lips painted like this is something I chose. The collar turns everything monstrous, a strip of metal at my throat that makes each breath feel borrowed.
Cobra would hate it.
The thought comes sharp. Immediate. He would look at this collar and become something the world wasn’t built to survive. I close my eyes for one second. Just one.
He’s coming.
Not hope like a wish. Not fantasy. Certainty. I don’t know how. I don’t know when. I don’t know what shape it will take. But he’s coming.
The tablet man snaps his fingers. “Move her.”
Two men step in.
I force my eyes open.
Their hands close around my arms, not violently, not rough the way others have been. Controlled. Efficient. That almost makes it worse, because it strips away even the small comfort of calling them reckless monsters. They’re careful because I’m sold. The collar stays. The lingerie stays. No dignity restored. No blanket. No clothes. No chance to become myself again before I’m moved from one cage to another.
One man guides me forward with a hand at my elbow. The other walks slightly behind me, close enough that I know he has the remote. I don’t look back to confirm. I can feel it.
The mirrored room disappears behind us. The hallway is colder. Concrete under my bare feet. Lights spaced too far apart, leaving pockets of shadow between them. Somewhere behind a closed door, a woman cries quietly. Somewhere else, a man laughs. The sounds don’t match. That might be the cruelest thing about this place. Pain and business live side by side here.
We pass the room where Eli is.
I know it before I see the door. My feet falter.
The man at my elbow tightens his grip. “Keep walking.”
My throat burns.
Eli.
I don’t know where they took him. I don’t know if they left him there. I don’t know if anyone will tell his family, his club, the people who would have yelled at him and teased him and eventually maybe patched him in because he died proving he had more honor than the men who killed him.
My knees threaten to weaken. I make them work.
Stay alive.
Tell them.
That becomes a small flame inside me.
If I live, I tell them he said no.
If I live, I tell them he fought.
If I live, I make sure Eli isn’t just blood on a floor in a room full of monsters.
“It’s time.” One of the men says in the doorway.
I stand not asking any questions.
The hallway ends at a heavy metal door. One of the men opens it, and cold night air rushes in.
