Cannon

2

She was yanked backward by her T-shirt, and old, rusty chains were wrapped over her wrists. Her captor locked them tightly, then retreated to the room with his other masked mates.

Instinctively, Ryver yanked at the chains. They were tight against the wall, and she clenched her fists and teeth to attempt to loosen them, even a bit. They didn’t budge, and she fell onto the ground in defeat.

At that point, she felt the urge to cry. There was nothing wrong with crying, but she found that it often clouded her practical way of thinking. She wanted to cry for the family she’d never get a chance to have. Helping others had been her number one priority and now she was going to die without ever being in love. God, she might never see her dad again. She’d never get a chance to hug him.

“I’m so sorry, Dad,” Ryver whispered into the empty space. She heard a few clinks and clamors of mice scurrying around the room. She sighed – how was she going to get herself out of this?

She could either wait for the ransom to be paid – which rarely turned out well – or she could escape. The chains felt tight, but they were old. Ryver was sure there was a way she could loosen them from the wall when she had the strength. You’ve got this, Ryver. You can do it. That’s what her dad always told her when she was in school and stressed with everything going on. Or when her first boyfriend broke up with her because she was too busy with school.

But she was exhausted. She needed to rest before she attempted her escape because she also had no idea where they had taken her. She tried to track the turns of the truck as they had left the village, but it was too long a drive to know for sure.

She thought about how her father would worry when the government reached him. She would figure this out herself the way she always did. Her father had taught her not to depend on anyone. People had a tendency of letting others down. She didn’t need anyone to help her out of the predicament she found herself in. She wished she could have the strength to get through this without crying.

Ryver closed her eyes, sitting on the floor of the shack. She heard nothing coming from outside, not even wildlife. Other than the rats that were moving about in the dark room, she was alone, and when she was alone, she could think and rest.

But before she knew it, she was falling away into the darkness of sleep. It was a comforting blanket after such a horrible day.

CANNON

Cannon awoke from his slumber to the sound of his dinner smacking the concrete floor in front of him. His eyes shot open to see a tray of slop spilling over the edges. He clenched his fists and growled at the guard walking away, chuckling to himself. “Oh good one, buddy, you think you’re really original, eh, f**k-face?”

Cannon moved from his seated position against the wall and felt the chain wrapped around his ankle yank. After two years in the Supermax, as the guards and inmates called this hellhole, he’d think he’d be used to it by now. Guess no one really got used to having their soul crushed every waking minute of the day.

The tray of food was just out of reach for him. He bellowed to himself as the tip of the nail caught the edge, then he was able to slowly inch it toward himself.

He picked up the tray, panting hard. That single movement had exhausted him, which was also a familiar sensation that he’d had to adjust to over the years of his confinement. He sighed with the tray on his legs. There was something moving in his meal, a bug of some sort, but that didn’t matter. Cannon needed strength from wherever he could find it. He dug into his dinner and fantasized about the better days.

The better days of shifting were what Cannon longed for like a long-lost lover. He used to be able to shift at any moment he wanted, then fly toward the moon, leaving everything behind. There was great freedom there, and that was something he had lost within the past years. His dragon had been contained, shackled, in an invisible prison inside his head while he sat in a real one. Every now and then, he would touch the implant on the back of his neck lovingly as if to calm the dragon and to reassure him that his freedom was coming.

Except he didn’t really know whether or not that freedom would ever come. He was a mercenary shifter caught fighting the U.S. government which made him “too dangerous to exist.” The bug planted in the back of his neck stacked his nervous system back into a human pile, one that made him weak and often sickly. He had tried to remove it once – probably all of the shifters in the prison had tried at least once. But the consequences were beyond dire.

The echoes of pain from the removal of the implant still haunted him. It was like having your spine ripped out from the top of your neck to your lower back. He had been paralyzed for over a month while his spine and nervous system slowly healed. If he’d been human, he would’ve died on the spot. He feared that he had killed his dragon altogether. But he could still feel his faint whisper. He longed to release him and fly away, to thrive on some high mountain that touched the sky.

And be completely alone.