Page 4 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

THREE

THE FIRST CAGE

VERA

H is words hang in the air like smoke from a funeral pyre, dense with finality. "Now I have to decide if you do, either."

My mind, which had been a screaming whirlwind of panic, goes utterly and completely silent.

The shift is violent, instantaneous—like stepping from chaos into a vacuum where sound dies and thought crystallizes into perfect, terrifying clarity.

This isn't a threat. Threats are promises of future violence, negotiations where survival remains possible, bargaining chips in games where both sides acknowledge the other's humanity.

This is something else entirely. A calm statement of fact delivered with the clinical precision of someone announcing weather conditions or stock prices.

He is not deciding whether to hurt me. He is deciding whether I am a person at all.

My lungs forget their function, oxygen becoming a theoretical concept trapped somewhere between throat and sternum—a useless bubble of pain that expands against my ribs without offering relief.

The corrugated steel wall seeps industrial cold through my thin jacket, penetrating fabric and flesh with mechanical persistence until the chill settles into my bones like winter made permanent.

Metal ridges press into my spine through cotton and fear, each groove a reminder that even this wall has more substance than my current claim to existence.

I wait for the sharp sting of a bullet. The cold kiss of a blade. I wait for my world to end.

But he doesn't move. A statue carved from shadow and violence, he simply watches me with eyes that reflect nothing—not anger, not satisfaction, not even basic recognition of shared humanity.

The silence between us stretches taut as piano wire, vibrating with tension that threatens to snap something essential inside my chest. The two men behind him—the ones who hunted me through shipping container canyons with the methodical patience of wolves—have transformed into stone gargoyles guarding gates that lead nowhere good.

The waiting is the torture.

He wants me to feel this moment of absolute powerlessness, to understand with cellular certainty that every breath I take exists only through his permission.

Each heartbeat is borrowed time, each blink an act of mercy he can revoke without warning or explanation.

My heart hammers frantic, useless percussion against my ribs—a desperate bird in a cage of bone that doesn't understand the bars are constructed from his will rather than steel.

The sound seems impossibly loud in the alley's steel-wrapped silence, each beat a countdown toward whatever verdict he's reaching in the calculating darkness behind those empty eyes.

Time becomes elastic, seconds stretching into geological epochs while I catalog what might be my final sensory experiences: salt air carrying stories of distant oceans, diesel fumes thick as syrup, the metallic taste of fear coating my tongue like copper pennies dissolved in saliva.

The smell of motor oil and something else—something organic and wrong, like rust mixed with old blood.

After an eternity that lasts only heartbeats, he gives a short, almost imperceptible nod to the men behind him.

The gesture is economical, precise—a CEO approving quarterly reports or a surgeon indicating the next incision.

Nothing personal. Nothing heated. Just business conducted with the efficiency of someone who has made this decision before.

The sentence has been passed. The jury of one has reached its verdict.

I just don't know what it is.

The nod is a release. A command. The machinery of my capture grinds into motion. The two men move in terrifying synchronization. One is cold, efficient, with eyes like a winter morgue. The other radiates violence like heat off summer asphalt.

The cold one reaches for my camera—my shield, the last piece of me that feels real. My fingers spasm, a desperate, useless command from a brain no longer in control. His grip is steel wrapped in flesh. He plucks the Nikon from my grasp like it's nothing.

No rush. No urgency. Predators who have already won.

He passes it to his brother without a glance. My life's work has been reduced to an inventory item. The dismissal cuts deeper than a blade.

Then the angry one has my arms. His fingers are talons in my biceps, a promise of bruises that will bloom like poisonous flowers. A promise that I am no longer a person. I am a possession.

Animalistic panic whites out my vision. The primal scream to fight—to claw, to bite, to do anything—floods my system.

But another voice cuts through the noise. Colder. Quieter. The one that has kept me breathing for two years. The one that teaches survival.

Don't fight, it commands, the clarity forged in blood. You can't win. Watch. Remember.

So I do. My body goes limp, a dead weight. Psychological jujitsu. While my muscles surrender, my mind becomes a lens, zooming in. The smell of stale smoke on his leather, incense from an altar of destruction. The specific design of a skull tattoo on the other's neck—a story told in ink and pain.

I turn terror into data. Helplessness into intelligence. It's the only control I have left. This violation is now reconnaissance. This capture is now an education.

The man who holds my life in his hands turns his back. The gesture is more devastating than any threat. A casual dismissal. I am a problem solved, a variable no longer worth monitoring.

His voice rumbles over his shoulder, echoing off the steel walls.

"Bring her."

The words detonate through my nervous system like shaped charges designed to destroy specific load-bearing structures in the architecture of my self-control.

I'm half-dragged, half-pushed from the alley, feet stumbling on uneven cobblestones that remember when this neighborhood served legitimate commerce instead of providing cover for the kind of business that requires darkness and silence.

Each stone seems to catch at my shoes, as if the street itself is trying to slow this progression toward whatever awaits.

They march me toward his motorcycle, and I understand immediately that this isn't just transportation—it's psychological warfare made manifest in chrome and steel.

The machine waits under sodium lights like something forged from nightmares and exhaust fumes, every surface designed to intimidate rather than comfort.

Black paint absorbs light instead of reflecting it, creating void-black silhouette that seems to devour photons.

A monument to controlled violence. A throne for someone who rules through fear.

He's already astride the beast, waiting with the infinite patience of someone who has never doubted that his commands will be obeyed.

The angry one shoves me forward with casual brutality, palm between my shoulder blades carrying enough force to remind me how easily he could snap my spine if the mood struck him.

"Get on."

My body freezes with the totality of system shutdown.

Every survival instinct I've cultivated screams against this command.

He expects me to climb onto that thing with him?

To press myself against the man who just decided whether I deserve to exist?

To wrap my arms around someone who views my continued breathing as administrative decision subject to revision without notice?

The President reaches out and hauls me onto the seat behind him.

His grip demonstrates effortless strength, mechanical efficiency that suggests he's had unwilling passengers before.

Many of them. My hip bumps against his solid muscle through worn denim, and I flinch away from the contact like touching live electrical wire.

But the seat is narrow, the physics unforgiving—there's nowhere to retreat, no distance to maintain between my body and the human representation of everything I've been running from.

There's no helmet waiting for me. Of course not.

My safety is afterthought, my comfort irrelevant to whatever equation he's calculating. The message is unmistakable: my life exists as variable in someone else's formula, valuable only insofar as it serves purposes I'm not permitted to understand.

The engine doesn't just start—it explodes to life.

A deep, guttural roar that vibrates from the soles of my feet up through my spine, shaking the very air molecules until everything becomes a percussion section in a symphony conducted by machinery designed for maximum intimidation.

The bike lurches forward with violence that throws me against his back, a solid wall of muscle and leather that represents everything I've been running from made flesh.

A scream dies in my throat before it can betray my position.

My hands fly to his waist without conscious command, fingers digging into worn leather of his cut—contact that revolts every nerve ending while representing the only thing preventing me from becoming street pizza.

The alternative to touching him is the asphalt flying past at terrifying velocity, concrete that would strip flesh from bone with mechanical indifference.

The wind becomes physical assault.

Ripping breath from my lungs, whipping tears from my eyes until they stream down my temples in silver tracks that taste of salt and terror.

The city dissolves into impressionist nightmare—neon and headlights bleeding together like watercolor painting left in rain, visual evidence of life I no longer belong to blurring past at speeds that make recognition impossible.

My hair whips across my face, each strand a tiny flogger delivering stinging reminders of how completely my control over even basic comfort has been revoked.