Page 107 of A Cage He Owns

“We are far from finished, little bird, in fact…”

“We have only just begun.”

TALL, DARK AND DANGEROUSLY HANDSOME

ANNA

The place I was renting was not an apartment, whatever the man who took my cash on the first of the month liked to call it.

It was one room above a hardware store, reached by an outside staircase that had rusted through in two places and a door that stuck whenever it rained. Inside there was a single bed against the far wall, a two-burner hot plate and a sink that counted as a kitchen, and a refrigerator the size of a nightstand that held milk and a jar of pickles and not much else.

The wallpaper had been cream once upon a time but had gone the color of weak tea. There was one window, and it looked out over the flat felt roof of the store and a parking lot in front of it. There was also a sign on the front of the building that put a thin red line along the ceiling at night, one that I had stopped noticing after the first week.

There was a bathroom that was claustrophobic at best. That was the whole of the luxury. A bathroom with a toilet and a sink and a tub with a shower in it that ran hot for about nine minutes before it gave up, and no window in it at all.

But it was better than a park bench, I had told myself when I signed for it. It only had to last until I knew what I was doing. That’s what else I told myself.

And now, I had no clue. Because in a single afternoon everything had changed and I had zero control over any of it.

He had seen to that.

Six weeks of leave cover and a contract they wanted to extend, that I had been quietly contemplating taking. It would have meant a better car if I stayed, and then who knows, in a few months I would get in it and drive to a new town and start all over again. That was my typical MO. It had been the plan for three years and I was extremely good at it by now.

And then a man had stood up out of a chair in a treatment room and taken the entire thing off me in about forty minutes.

I sat on the end of that bed with my coat still on and made myself go through it properly.

The van had followed me the whole way home and they hadn’t been subtle about it this time. It sat four cars back the entire length of that road, and when I came off at the intersection it came off seconds later. Then when I pulled up outside the hardware store it went past me and parked forty yards down with its lights off and didn’t move again. But that wasn’t the only one, as I saw a second one on the far side of the lot.

Which meant that my ghost wasn’t playing around this time.

But the part I kept coming back to and had turned over in my mind the whole way home was the only thing I could cling to…

He was not getting out.

That was the thing I hung onto. He was in a locked forensic hospital with two fences and a vehicle airlock. So, it didn’t matter how many strings he pulled to get himself into it, nobody pulls a string that gets you out again. Which meant that whatever this was, it was a man on my ward who wanted me to keep coming to it. It was blackmail and it was surveillance. Meaning it was going to be the worst few months of my life, but it had edges.

It had shadows.

And shadows I could work with eventually, because shadows meant there was always somewhere to hide. And men who are paid to watch the boring life of a woman who did nothing but live as simply as one could, well… men like that made mistakes eventually. Three years had taught me that much. They get tired, or they get bored, or somebody gets moved onto something more interesting. The surveillance thins without anybody deciding to thin it. All I had to do was be patient and be boring and be there at the exact moment when it happened.

But there was also the hospital itself.

Because I had known about the tunnels since before my first shift.

It was simply what I did, and I had been doing it since the day I started running. I didn’t walk into a building without knowing how to get out of it, and I didn’t take a job anywhere until I had sat with a laptop and found every way of doing that. And it was amazing what you could find on the internet. Fire plans, old planning applications and whatever a local history society has scanned in and forgotten about. Exits, gates, which doors are alarmed and which are only locked, which fence has a service road behind it. I did it at the nursing home and I did it at the rural clinic and I did it at Ashlock, and at Ashlock the answer was that there was no way out at all, which was exactly why I felt safe there. Because it wasn’t like just anyone could walk in there like the other places I worked.

At Corwin the answer was the tunnels.

They ran under the gardens and out beneath the fence line. They ended at a small brick building at the far edge of the grounds that everybody in 1884 was told was a store. There was a door onto them on the lower corridor of Cedar, past the old laundry, with a padlock on it older than my father would have been, God rest his soul.

It has been my way out since the first week, and until that afternoon it had been one I never expected to need.

Which was what changed on the drive home.

Because a panicked run through a tunnel wasn’t an escape, it was a head start at best. He had his men on my street and a camera in my room, which meant I had to be smarter this time. I had to give myself time to plan or I would find myself in the back of a van before I knew it.