A Dog & All Its Teeth

Cassidy Engleman, better known as Cass, hated being broke more than anything else. There was a certain flavor of desperation to knowing there was no money that set her teeth on edge. It happened all the time, one poor decision leading to a string of worse decisions, usually ending with her waking up in a puddle of blood or vomit. This week had ended in vomit, which was arguably the better end of the spectrum. Every time, she said she would do better. Within a few weeks, she was back on her bullshit. Rinse and repeat.

That’s how she ended up crawling through a window at two in the morning on a Wednesday to drop into a shuttered warehouse. Copper was easy to move, almost untraceable, and plentiful enough that the stakes stayed low in places like this. Jeremy had offered her a cut of his job tomorrow, but there were too many moving parts, plus she hated his brother. Her three-day bender had her hurting everywhere, her brain feeling like she’d dropped it in bleach and left it in the sun. She was grumbling about how stupid she was as she pulled the almost-empty bag back onto her shoulders.

The easy stuff had already been picked over on the bottom floor as she wandered in the dark. The warehouse was full of creaks and groans, her eyes too wide as she rounded corners, fingers resting on the gun at her hip. She felt rather than heard something off, the floor vibrating under her boots. She touched the wall. Same vibration. The bass was shaking the structure. She waited to see if it would pass with whatever vehicle it was coming from. It didn’t.

“Fucking hell,” she muttered, pulling the gun and checking that it was loaded before starting down the hall. Pop-up rave, probably, kids using the space for fun—but it never hurt to be prepared. She’d rather not see any of them, just get what she came for and go. As she moved deeper into the building, the vibrations sharpened into music trickling through the walls. Not party music. Something low and grinding, almost discordant.

A crowd—a chorus of yells, suddenly audible—then a hush. What the fuck was happening? A quiet crowd usually meant trouble. Her skin crawled, the fine hairs lifting on her neck. She slowed to a crawl as the music cleared. It made her feel angry, like she needed to break something to bleed off the pressure building in her fingertips.

Lights flashed under a set of double swinging doors. There was no one in the hallway approaching them, but she stayed leery. Another chorus of whoops, then the distinctive crack of leather on skin. Her stomach dropped as adrenaline flooded her body. She had to see now—morbid curiosity winning out over sense.

The steel doors were thick, leading into a loading bay, narrow windows set into them. She didn’t nudge them open. She angled herself to see through the glass instead.

In the center of a makeshift ring of spotlights stood a contradiction. Tall, taller still in six-inch heels, wrapped in lace delicate enough to tear at a touch, a leather corset painted onto him like a second skin. His face was severe—sharp lines exaggerated by makeup, softened only by full lips the color of a fresh bruise. Coppery skin gleaming with glitter and sweat. A braided whip hanging loose from one long-fingered hand.

He moved like a predator that had already decided pouncing wasn’t worth the effort. His prey was chained to a rack at the center of the ring—a man with his chest laid open in neat parallel lines, blood streaming. The red was lurid against pale skin, and she found herself admiring the precision of it more than the wound itself. The crowd had gone hushed and expectant, watching him move.

She pressed closer to the glass as his wrist flicked, almost lazy. The whip cracked like a gunshot. The bound man screamed behind his gag as a fresh line of blood welled up. The crowd cheered. He wasn’t even breathing hard—she could see the rise and fall of his chest, smooth and unbothered, like the violence cost him nothing.

He leaned in close to the bound man, mouth moving, fingers trailing through the blood collecting at his waistband. Then he turned to the crowd, arms spread, and bowed once before circling back. The whip moved in time with the bassline like it was alive. The crowd didn’t move even after his bow, and that was when she noticed: the man on the rack had pissed himself, a dark stain spreading down the front of his pants.

“Fuck,” she hissed, knocking her head against the door. It creaked. She prayed the music covered it, but when she looked back through the window, he was already looking at her. Logically, he couldn’t have seen her behind the glare of the lights. The intent in his eyes said otherwise. He knew.

All she’d wanted was copper and a way out with enough for the mortgage in two days. Instead she’d found a snuff show.

He moved again before she could decide anything, the whip wrapping tight around the bound man’s throat. He pulled. The man’s face went red, then purple, his legs kicking uselessly against the chain. Cass had been choked more than a few times herself. She knew exactly how long it should take to pass out—and knew he wasn’t doing it that way. He was dragging it out on purpose.

She should have left right then. She stood there instead, some ugly, curious part of her watching the play of muscle in his back as he held the tension, cataloguing the exact moment the fight started leaving the hanging man’s legs. It would have been easy to keep watching. That was the part that scared her enough to move.

She got out her Zippo—a dented, battered thing she loved for no reason she could name—while she circled the room in a crouch, eyes on the heavy curtain hung over the bay doors. The bound man’s struggle was slowing. She got close enough to see the whip-wielder’s eyes flash toward her, amber and sudden, and knew she had maybe two seconds. She upended the airplane bottle of whiskey from her pocket onto the dusty velvet and touched the flame to it.

He snarled something she couldn’t hear over the whoosh of fire and the screaming that followed. The crowd broke and scattered like roaches under a light. She threw her arm across her nose and mouth against the smoke, and that was when the whip caught her wrist—white-hot, searing, cinched tight before she’d even felt him move.

He hauled her backward hard enough to nearly take her shoulder out of the socket. She scrambled, clawing at the leather on her wrist, boots slipping in the blood underfoot as she found her footing and turned to face him.

He had a foot on her in the heels. Didn’t matter—it made him easier to take down. She drove her shoulder into his stomach before he could get the whip fully set, and they went down together in a tangle of leather and lace. He was fast. A punch snapped her head back, split her lip, and she came up grinning, blood in her teeth, and put two of her own into his face—nose, then the cut opening over his cheekbone.

He got the whip around her throat next, wrist and neck both, hauling her back against him as she clawed uselessly at the line, too thin to get a finger under. The room started to gray at the edges. She threw her head back into his groin as hard as she could.

He grunted, tension slack for half a second—long enough for another punch before she turned into him. She didn’t try to knock him down again. She dropped into a crouch, wrapped her arms around his neck, and let herself go dead weight, taking them both to the ground. The concrete was slick with blood—his, hers, the third man’s, she couldn’t tell anymore—and she dug her fingers into the tendons of his neck to keep him close while he pummeled her ribs.

The smoke was getting into her lungs before he stopped. He got his fingers into her armpits and dug in, hard enough that her arms went dead and useless at her sides. She hissed, coughed smoke, and then he had her pinned—knee across her hips, both arms crushed under his weight, one hand at her throat. Not squeezing.

He just stopped there, breathing hard, blood dripping off his chin onto her collarbone, both their eyes streaming from the smoke. She stopped fighting to actually look at him—really look. His eye was swelling shut. The gash on his cheekbone had cut clean through what was left of his makeup. His amber eyes were catching the firelight, mouth open as he fought for air same as she was.

They needed to move. Neither of them did.

He looked curious now, not angry, eyes dropping to her split knuckles, to the blurred tattoo on the forearm still pinned under his knee. Something in her stomach clenched that had nothing to do with adrenaline. She wanted to lick the blood off his face—could taste the copper of it already, phantom on her tongue—and something in her expression must have given that away, because his mouth split into a grin that had teeth in it. She’d have bet next month’s mortgage he was thinking the exact same thing.

He picked her up like she weighed nothing. Her arms went around his neck on reflex, bracing for another hit that didn’t come. He carried her through the smoke, hands gripping her thighs hard enough to bruise, and used her weight to shove the door open into the hallway.

The air was clearer there. He slammed her into the wall, the full press of his body against hers, and her fingers were in his hair before she’d decided to put them there, pulling until his head tipped back. Her teeth found his throat first, then her tongue along the mark she’d left. He tasted like salt and adrenaline. When she let go, his mouth crashed into hers—blood, the first thing she registered, then the hot slide of his tongue, his teeth catching her lip.

The kiss fought the same way they had, for control, both of them bleeding for it. His hand slid up into her hair and pulled hard, the way she’d pulled his, and she gasped into his mouth, grinding her hips into him instead of pulling away. Her nails found his shoulder blades and drew blood. He tipped her head back until she was looking at the ceiling and bit down hard on her throat. She groaned and pulled him closer.

He stilled, mouth still against her neck. Sirens.

Stupid fucking warehouse. Stupid fucking man. Stupid fucking body, betraying her like this.

He didn’t let go of her hair, but the grip loosened. He kissed her once more, ground his hips into hers, dragged her back against the wall, and then set her down.

“Move,” he said, voice a rough rasp that lit something white-hot in her chest anyway. He took her hand and pulled her the opposite direction from the way she’d come in, running with the same fluid grace he’d fought and performed with, even in the heels.

The warehouse spilled them into a narrow alley, another abandoned building looming beside it. The night air was frigid after the fire. They stood there catching their breath as part of the roof gave way behind them with a slow, grinding collapse, sirens closing in on the street.

She started laughing—a jagged, half-hysterical sound—doubling over to wipe the blood off her face. He watched her, grinning, eyes still fever-bright.

“You owe me a cage,” he said, hands on his hips.

She straightened, pushed her damp hair out of her face. He looked wrecked—blood and glitter and sweat, makeup smeared past recognition, hair curling loose at his neck.

“Come to 9832 Loweth in two days. I’ll have your cage.”

The skin-crawling dread from earlier was gone. Her mind was quiet in a way that scared her more than the fire had. She glanced back at the darkness swallowing the end of the alley.

“I’ll see you at 6.” She turned and ran. Didn’t look back. Chest burning the whole way.