Hunted

Chapter 6- Memories, part 2

I thought she was done. I thought I'd said enough, done a good enough job not panicking, but after a short break, Elena's voice came back again. This time I didn't want to hear her. I didn't want her to talk, I didn't want her to ask questions, I just wanted to go to sleep and pretend that I was somewhere else.

"Okay. There's just a bit more and we'll be done. Jeremy wanted to know a bit about your injuries and then you can go sleep." She spoke slower though, like she wasn't pressing me now, and I wondered if I could have said 'No, I've had enough'.

"My injuries?" I wasn't sure why it mattered so much.

"Yes. You limp."  Elena didn't explain why she wanted to know that. My mind raced, trying to understand, tried to find logic to pacify the painicked wolf inside me that felt uneasy all over again. Not so they could determin my weakness, I tried to reassure it, nothing like that. Maybe it was to get a clear picture of what they'd be walking into, if there'd be injuries all over the place. I hadn't even thought of the limp, not for a while, having shoved it to the back of my mind with other things in favor of escaping. "I think I broke my hip somehow. I just remember a lot of pain, and refusing to let doctors come in to touch me. And..." Oh fuck. Yes, I did remember, and I remembered why I'd decided to ignore it. Forget it.

Elena didn't probe. She went just the slightest bit pale. But she sat up straighter. Clearly willing herself to ask something she was half afraid to hear the answer to. "Did they force you?"

The question was so blunt, so unexpected, I flinched. She frowned, eyes narrowing, as if she'd already decided what the answer was.

"No."

That was not the answer she'd settled on, her face in obvious surprise, and then an expression which I might have guessed was 'Maybe she's forgotten if it happened'.

"No." I repeated, shifting uncomfortably, thinking it was better to just tell her how my hip had broken so she'd get that idea out of her head. He'd done a lot of fucked up shit to me but force was being saved for a special occasion. "No, it wasn't anything like force. I remember being in a cage with a girl and having to fight her. To the death. I lost and so that made me the winner- they wanted weaker pets- so I ended up with a broken hip.”

A sharp inhale from the corner Clayton was still settled in, eyes still not taking me in, his eyes on Elena instead.

Elena's eyes had narrowed too, particularly at the word 'collar', and she said very carefully, "It never got treated?"

"They told me to wear the collar if I wanted them to fix it. I spat at them and made a splint for it by breaking the bed apart. It healed and I don't walk the same but I can still walk. I run a little slower, that's it. I didn't want to wear the dog collar." My jaw set stubbornly at that, like it had that night, when they'd offered me morphine and assistance. Fuck them. I wasn't a dog and I wasn't going to use that drug again.

"What the fuck is this about a collar?" Clayton's knuckles were white, his jaw tight, eyes fixed on me with a look that I suspected wasn't to do with me at all. I didn't know werewolf tradition but I suspected it was like trying to offer a collar to a fully grown wild wolf. It wasn't done.

"Did all the girls have to wear them?" Elena didn't shush him, her gaze still on me.

"Yes. He already had one girl walking on a leash. Anyone who refused got the whip and I think someone died after he whipped her. They... they had ways to break us. Different ways. My master and the others did different things. I don't know what, I just know that it...” I couldn't speak for a while. Instead, I felt fogged in by memories, my nose, my ears, my 'inner wolf', trapped in a cage as I heard those sounds again. Distress, pleading, screams, crying, anger. I couldn't put it into words and I didn't want to. Instead I skipped it. “Pav was wearing hers when I broke her out and I made her destroy it.”