A Living Shield (John Price x OC/Reader slowburn)

41) Choking Confessions

[🎵: Evanescence - Tourniquet]

People say you can smell fear.

How the pheromones released from your body carry the single signature that screams fright. Expelled by every bead of sweat, set free from your skin.

But that's where it ultimately ends. Fear, or rather alarm, is about the one thing another creature could come close to perceive. A dead giveaway really on how an opponent is doing in the face of panic.

At least that's what people say. That the body is truly only capable of sharing its most anxiety filled state.

But was it? Because if the body could share weakness..

..surely it could share warning too.

The door that led to your cell, now quiet as night, it forbode something. A certain air hung around it. A person couldn't smell it, or hear it, or even see it. At least nothing human could. Your screaming of threats, your profanities, your death sentences, they'd all died down by now. It had been overly abundant, you were out of your mind for quite a while. Whatever Castillo had done or said, it had made an impact and the entire building had been witness to the rage that spread from that little dark room. And whether they were your enemy or not, whispers had done the rounds and impressions had been made. The fury of that prisoner they'd had all this time, it was nothing short of unnerving. Like the room to a den of some kind. What animal it housed? Nothing they were willing to find out.

For every person that came near your cell door, or even just walked by that hallway that led to your concrete room, swore on their grave it oozed an aura they couldn't place. The hairs in the back of their neck rising, as if out of instinct.

And one could say the body wasn't capable of much, but a gut feeling? The warning of danger?

It's something every person was capable of sensing.

And dangerous you were. You'd shown as much. Bound to your chair, bending the limits of your restraints and beyond. They came in heaps to push you down, undo you of your pathetic bindings. Before they rebound you again, to a sturdier metal chair. A far smarter choice, because the one from before, whether it had been bolted down or not, it wouldn't have held you much longer. It's wood now a splintered wreck.

They knew too. If it had given way, you'd have killed anyone on sight. Castillo, Witch, all the other bystanders. How? Details really. Getting your hands on something blunt or sharp, it would have been child's play and ultimately, had the same bloody outcome. Wrath and pain would do that to a person if subjected to it in the amounts that you had.

And if there was one person who's wrath was impossible to quell, it was yours.

Sitting there, stewing in it, simmering...it grew. Rose to formidable proportions, to heights you had previously never thought realistic. Hell, Price had driven you up the walls and back so often, you figured you'd reached the edge of what anger could truly feel like. You never realised a single person could frustrate you day in, day out the way he did. You never expected there to be something that could push you further than your captain. But the chair you sat on, the bile that still coated your tastebuds, it proved you horribly wrong.

You didn't control it either, the polluted anger. Filled with bits and pieces of your distorted past, like particles in the air that slowly but steadily intoxicated you with every inhale. You let it consume you, until it poured out of every crack and nook of the concrete cell you'd called your resting place for the last week. The feeling you exuded absolutely morbid, to the point where it tore down the temperature. Chills racing down people's spine whenever they strayed too close to your domain. And people wisely stayed away. As if standing in front of that door meant standing in your warpath.