Caged.
Echo
The bass doesn’t so much play as it lives in the walls, slow and relentless as a heartbeat, which is how night tells me it has begun. I wake the same way I always do: from one nightmare into the next. The lock on my cage scrapes, a metal rasp I could pick out of a storm. The door judders. This box is deliberately too small, wide enough that I can sleep if I curl around the bucket and tall enough that if I sit straight my head knocks the bars. Gold sings softly when my chain is tugged: permission to step out. The collar at my throat is thick and ostentatious, a showpiece pretending to be jewelry, welded to a heavy chain that splits to my wrists and climbs to the mask hooked behind my skull. The cuffs shimmer prettily while biting like teeth; dark magic thrums inside them, a cold, constant pressure that keeps my power muffled like a scream under ice. The mask is only metal, a gilded jaw curving over my mouth and the lower half of my nose, shaped to frame my blue eyes and my black hair so I look like a delicate thing. It isn’t delicate and it isn’t beautiful. It’s a silencer. Four years of it, pressing my jaw so tight I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. I’ve been here more than ten. I used to count days. Now I count smaller things: how the music shifts when the crowd gets drunker, how my chain drags heavier on the left than the right, how many breaths between the tug and the first hit if I misstep. I’m the last of my kind. At least, I haven’t met another elementi since the night my world turned to smoke. I remember the false wall my parents built, the shake in my mother’s hands as she hid me, the heat blooming across the floorboards like a second sun. The wolves laughed while the thatch caught. The air went syrup-thick with burning sap. When the smoke made our hiding place a furnace, I ran. Alpha Julian’s men found me soot-streaked and stupid with grief. He said I was pretty. Useful later. He spared me the way a cat spares a mouse when it’s still playing. He kept his promise. When I turned sixteen and the power in my blood woke, the first breath of winter across a lake, I was wildfire for a heartbeat. I took his club roof to floor and almost got free. Almost. After that: chains. After that: a cage.
“Breakfast.” A guard shoves a paper cup through the bars. The straw is bent where his thumb crushed it. There’s a tiny hole punched in the mask at my mouth for this; two at my nose so I don’t suffocate. The blend tastes like lukewarm oatmeal and metal. I don’t remember how it feels to chew.
The chain tugs again. I follow, collar rasping over a healing welt. Down the corridor, past the cracked mirror that reflects only my eyes and a slash of gold, into the yard where the other girls wait against the wall. Someone tears away my ragged dress. Velcro, so they never unhook my chains and the hose hits. Pressure. Shock. A stinging sheet that pins me to the concrete. It sluices away stale perfume and smoke and the last of last night’s blood where I bit my tongue when the pole caught my jaw. Farah stands three girls down, pale and slim, hair wet and dark against her shoulders. The wolves call her omega because it pleases them to. She’s vampire. They keep her weak with drops, never a full feed. She catches my eye and lifts her hands.
Are you okay? she signs, quick and compact.
Her mother was deaf; Farah learned young. When she arrived three years ago, she taught me in the dark behind the stage while the music pounded and the guards thought we were fixing our hair. The mask squeezes my jaw so tight I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. Signing lets us be loud without making a sound.
I’m okay. A little sore. At least Shithead didn’t feed me today.
The smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth. She knows which guard I mean. He took last night’s mistake like a gift from the moon: my chain catching on the center pole, the stutter of metal, the lurch as it wrapped, balance gone. The clang of my skull against the bars. The wolves’ laughter. The drag to the dressing room and the quiet after.
“Dressing room, now!” a guard bellows. The chain tugs in a rhythm that expects obedience. I swipe my torn dress from the floor, more habit than dignity, and fall into line beside Farah. Under the red neon sign, the backstage heat swallows us. I hang the dress on a wire hanger and watch water drip from it to the concrete. A different guard, newer, or simply less cruel, holds up two outfits to choose from. That’s their game: gift the illusion of choice. I point to the black corset and tiny shorts. He nods. Farah laces me tight, careful around the places that bruise easy. I twist my hair into a high knot. The mask freezes my expression; eyeliner makes my eyes sharp, a weapon I’m still allowed to carry.
“Five minutes, ladies!” someone shouts from the door.
Wouldn’t want to keep the filthy dogs waiting, would we? I sign, lazy with it. Farah bites back a laugh that would get us in trouble.
The club is all heat and spill: sweat and liquor and wolf musk, leather and cheap citrus cleaner. Fairy lights scallop the edges of the room, and the main stage glitters with a heavy, oversized cage like a promise. I don’t need directions. There is only one place for me. Center stage. Golden bars. A latch that clicks extra loud when it closes. My chain locks to the base of the pole. Test the give, test the swing. The door slams. The key travels to a pocket I can map in my sleep.
You’d think they were scared of you, Farah signs from her pole across the floor, lips barely moving. The beat swallows any sound. I snort. The mask swallows that, too. The show is a song I have danced a hundred ways. Wolves circle, drunk on the bass and their own power. I move precisely: steps that won’t snag the chain, wrists angled so the cuffs don’t tear the tender skin. The trick is to make it look like I’m offering something while I measure the room. Counting guards. Noting exits. Cataloging who watches me like I might bite, because once, I did. The music drags me with it and for a breath I pretend my power isn’t a lake locked under winter, that if I inhale deep enough I can crack it. The cuffs hum colder. The ice holds.