“Huh?” Emmitt asked, distracted as he turned up the volume on the speakers to no luck.
“His sentence. How much longer did he get for eating that guard? Number Seventeen.”
“Oh. Uh, no extra time.”
“Why?” she asked, shuffling her paperwork from the clipboard into a neat pile.
Emmitt tossed her a dirty look over his shoulder. Instead of answering her question, he said, “At least you got the interview footage. That will surely have volume. I couldn’t hear jack shit when you two were talking.”
“I think I should do more of these interviews with him. He seemed to open up. It may make him more docile when he needs to be moved, or…fed.” Or something. “Why did you turn the lights off on him?” That part pissed her off. From here, she could see his heat signature like snake vision. The man was pure red.
“I told you he’s a creature of darkness. We try to keep him calm. His kind like caves, so we do what we can to keep him from going dragon on us.”
“But he’s human, too. You’re keeping a man in the dark with no mental stimulation. That’s awful. I want this changed right away.”
“Veto.”
“I have authority to change his living conditions if they don’t meet acceptable standards.”
Emmitt sighed loudly, stood, and flipped the switch, turning on the light. “Your ass will be fired as soon as he gets overstimulated and Changes in his cell. He needs to do that in a cage especially made for the dragon. You haven’t seen the Change yet, so you aren’t careful like you should be...”
Emmitt continued talking, but she tuned him out since she was too busy looking at Vyr, sitting just where she’d left him on the mattress. He wasn’t looking at her, but had his chin lowered and was running a hand over and over his shaved head, right over the long scar.
She would bet her tits the New IESA did that, and a part of her didn’t even want to know why they’d performed surgery on him. This prison wasn’t what it seemed, at least not in the lower levels. This was horrible mistreatment of a prisoner.
“Why no time, Emmitt?” she asked again.
“Because paperwork, Mercer. We all get the big salaries to work down here, but we all signed the same confidentiality and release forms. That’s the trade-off. You don’t have parents. You don’t have family. You don’t have friends. You don’t have any attachment to the outside world. You know how I know? Because that’s one of the requirements to work down here. You have to be completely expendable. Accept that now, and it’ll make you careful enough to survive this place. Number Seventeen, Chad, wasn’t careful with the monster, and he got himself eaten. No one outside of this facility will be made aware of that fact, and adding to Vyr’s sentence would mean paperwork. We have to explain our actions, and that New IESA lab down the hall? They wouldn’t let us explain our actions. We would come up missing before that happened.”
“You mean people aren’t allowed to know what’s going on down here because of how you treat the Red Dragon. You don’t want the media all over this.”
“You sure are a nosy bitch, aren’t you?”
“No, I think it’s fair to know exactly what I’ve walked into.”
“You’re a bad person,” Emmitt uttered as he rested his butt against the desk. “Know how I know? Because they wouldn’t have hired you if you had morals. And you wouldn’t have taken a job like this if you had a conscience. I don’t have one either. No one down here does.”
“What did Chad do?”
Emmitt shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care.”
“But Vyr cared enough to eat him.”
“Vyr is a monster. He’s mindless, and when he gets hungry, he eats. He’s not a man. He’s pure animal. Wrap your head around that real quick, or you’ll be in the belly of the beast next. We have six months and a shit-ton of work to do to make the world safe again. You’re part of a super hero squad the world will never know about and will never thank you for. We make the hard decisions to keep it safe from monsters like the Red Dragon. Your only job is to make him steady so we can get him where he needs to be.”
“Dragon-less?”
Emmitt smiled, but it never reached his eyes. “No darlin’. Dead.”
Chapter Four
It was all Riyah could do to get through the rest of the day. She met all the lower-level inmates and eight of the upper levels. Her office was small but worked fine. She was to take on the hardest cases and try to make life in the shifter prison easier for everyone. The aggression in there was off the charts. Twice, she’d watched two silverback gorillas go to war in the cafeteria. No provoking each other either, they just locked eyes across the table and went to blows. And it happened again as the guards were dragging them out. They’d had to tranquilize one of them and Taser the other.
Thankfully, some of the upper-level guards were shifters, so they were strong enough to handle the brutal stuff, but geez, she was feeling way out of her element here.
Her theory? They didn’t have shifter guards down on the lower level because they would see what the New IESA and the research lab were doing and cause havoc.
Little did Emmitt fuckin’ know, she was the one he needed to worry about, because no matter how long it took and how patient she had to be, she was going to blow the lid right off this place.
Starting with a phone call.
Clara Daye picked up on the second ring. “You’re on the burner phone?”
“Yes,” Riyah murmured.
“Where are you?”
“Sitting in the parking lot of Fed-Ex. I have something I need to overnight you.”
“What is it?”
“Video of your son. It needs to get to his crew, but you should see it first. And Clara?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s time to bring in Damon.”
A deep sigh blasted static on the other end. “Is it that bad?”
“They’re killing him.”
“What?”
“The New IESA is involved, and they aren’t just trying to take his dragon. They want him eliminated, and they can’t do it when he’s still this strong, so they are killing the dragon first. The second he is weak enough, they are going after Vyr.”
“Oh, my God,” Clara whispered.
“It gets worse.”
“How the fuck can it get worse?” Clara blasted into the phone.
“I toured a research lab on the lower level. They are making something with the tissue and blood samples they’ve been taking from Vyr.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know. But there was one small room no one was allowed in except the head researcher, and when we passed, it looked like there was a two-person team studying blood and tissue samples. And in the middle of the room was this huge canister that was lit up with a red neon light, and through the window of it, I could see a single vial of something. The room was completely locked down.”
“Riyah, did you get a feel for anything in there?”