Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(59)

“Are you missing any memories?” I dipped my bread in soup, then took another bite. I was hungry in spite of the circumstances. “Is anyone else, that you know of?”

“No.” Finally he pulled one rib from the rack.

“Then it doesn’t make much sense that I would be,” I said, as he tore a chunk of meat from the bone with his teeth. Unless they’d shocked me over and over, during my missing weeks. “It could be the drugs.”

He dropped the rib onto his tray again, almost untouched, and his voice rumbled with anger. “Someone drugged you?”

“I think so. I woke up sluggish and disoriented this morning, and there are several different pharmaceutical sources of memory loss. Vandekamp could have given me anything.”

“But why?”

I shrugged. “Memory loss could be an unintended side effect. Or maybe there’s something he doesn’t want me to remember.” I tore a hunk from my roll, and again it occurred to me that my food could be poisoned. “So what have I forgotten?”

“That I know of?” Gallagher ripped one rib from his rack. “Thirteen of my fights. At least as many trips to the infirmary. And the occasional noncombat event where people wearing expensive clothes want to see the reigning arena champion, for the additional cost of five thousand dollars a night.”

“It costs them five grand just to look at you?”

Instead of answering, Gallagher took renewed interest in his dinner.

“They don’t just look, do they?”

He took his time chewing and swallowing, and when I hadn’t moved on by the time he’d finished his bite, he sighed. “Willem Vandekamp has amassed a large list of very wealthy and very depraved clients.”

I knew that much even without eight weeks’ worth of memories. “When we’re free, we will burn this place to the ground.”

Gallagher’s smile was the slow coalescence of every violent, indignant, vengeful impulse we shared. “Flames are a particularly poetic form of destruction.”

“So is blood.” I lifted my milk carton and held it toward him. “To fire and blood.”

He tapped my carton with his own. “To vengeance and death. May they all get what they deserve.”

I drained my milk carton. Then I crushed it.

“How long did I stay that night?” I asked a while later, as I slid our empty trays into the hall. “The night you killed Argos. Did they leave me here until morning?”

“No. They came for you in the middle of the night,” he said as I sank onto the mat next to him and tucked my feet beneath me. “And they didn’t let you keep my shirt.”

My dinner threatened to come back up. They’d made me march naked through the grounds. And they would do it again.

When the lights went out, instead of curling up on Gallagher’s sleep mat, we sat side by side in the dark while he told me about all the beasts he’d been forced to kill, including the two whose blood had kept him alive.

In the middle of the night, footsteps echoed from the hall, and my heart lurched into my throat. Gallagher’s light came on. I stood, and he stood with me. My hands hovered at the hem of the borrowed shirt, but I wasn’t going to take it off voluntarily.

The door opened, and Bowman tossed a set of scrubs and underwear at me. “Change quickly.”

I headed into the bathroom to get dressed, trying not to look too grateful.

“I hope to see you sooner than eight weeks from now,” Gallagher said, when I emerged, fully dressed.

“Me too.” I stepped closer to whisper the rest. “Promise me that if I don’t remember this, you’ll tell me everything we’ve talked about tonight.”

“You have my word.” Gallagher pulled me into a hug, and I gasped at the sudden aching pain in my breasts. “What’s wrong?” He stepped back to study my eyes, searching for the source of my pain.

“Nothing,” I mumbled. But my eyes fell closed as the sudden, surreal truth coalesced from the bits and pieces of information I had.

Nausea. Exhaustion. Sore breasts. Though I still had no idea how my memory had been taken, I understood exactly why.

I hadn’t been drugged. I was pregnant.





Delilah

Alone in my cell again, I used the restroom and brushed my teeth, but I didn’t taste the toothpaste or feel the bristles.

Pregnant.

The enormity of that idea was so overwhelming that at first, I couldn’t think past it. A lifetime ago, I’d thought I might want kids someday. Back when I’d had a normal life and inalienable rights. When the best thing about my boyfriend’s compulsive stability was what a great dad he’d be.

But now?

I didn’t have a boyfriend. I hadn’t had sex since the day I was sold into the menagerie.

Except obviously I was wrong about that.

Tears filled my eyes, so I closed them. I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming as images flickered behind my eyelids.

Hands reaching for Zyanya’s straps. The private room hidden by drapes. The party host handing his credit card to the guard.

Was that how it had happened? Was I rented for a night? An hour?

Did I fight?

My stomach heaved, and I lurched for the toilet. My dinner came back up and I flushed it away, but the nausea remained.