Page 15 of Roar Me Like You Mean It
At the bottom, the hall widens. There are guards here, two of them, standing outside a door marked with nothing but a black square. Their stance is military, backs straight, guns held like extensions of their arms. For a second, I hold still, thinking. My plan was simple: get inside, record evidence, get out. But the way they move tells me the simple part ended the second I stepped in here.
I pull a small canister from my pocket, thumb against the nozzle. It’s experimental, something Marcy’s friend in tactical procurement smuggled me. Supposedly disorients for forty seconds, enough to move. I whisper under my breath, “Forty better be enough,” and step out.
The spray hisses, catching both men by surprise. One curses, stumbling back, rubbing at his eyes. The other lifts his weaponbut too late. I slam into him, elbow high, driving his head back against the wall. He grunts and crumples. I don’t check if he’s out cold. I don’t have time.
I swipe the stolen card from his belt across the black square. The door clicks and I slip inside.
And freeze.
This is no storage unit.
The room hums with power, lined with cylindrical tanks that rise from floor to ceiling, glass fogged in places but clear enough in others to see what lies inside. Shapes. Some human, some not. The sight clenches my stomach so hard I taste bile. Their bodies float in suspension fluid, tubes running into their arms, their necks, their chests. I step closer to one and realize the proportions are wrong. Too long in the limbs. Eyes that don’t look entirely human even shut behind lids.
Vega wasn’t lying.
I lift my phone, snap pictures as fast as my hands will allow, each flashless click a piece of evidence that I know could bring the whole damn empire down if I live long enough to deliver it.
But then the alarm shrieks.
Red light floods the room, and the door behind me slams open. Boots pound against steel. Voices shout in clipped commands, German accents sharp and efficient.
“Secure her!”
I spin, heart hammering, and dart between the tanks, weaving toward the far side of the room. A guard lunges, his hand grazing my arm. I twist free, slam the heel of my hand up into his chin, and keep running. But the second door at the back is locked, no panel to override, just sealed metal that doesn’t care about my desperation.
They corner me fast, three of them fanning out, guns raised, the red light flashing off their weapons. My chest heaves. I grip the canister again, but it’s small comfort against rifles.
Then it happens.
The air shifts, heavy and electric, like the room itself is holding its breath. For a moment even the guards hesitate, as if they feel it too. Then the sound comes—a low, guttural growl, ancient in a way no throat I’ve ever heard could make. It rolls through the walls, through my bones, deeper than hearing, a vibration that rattles the tanks and makes the fluid inside slosh.
The guards glance at each other. One mutters a curse.
The growl builds, louder, closer, until it cuts through the red haze like a blade. Then the first guard is gone, dragged sideways into the dark with a scream cut short. The second spins, firing blindly, bullets ricocheting against reinforced glass. The third shouts for backup before something hits him hard enough to break bone, the crack echoing through the room.
I duck low, crawling between the tanks, heart in my throat. I can’t see it—not clearly—but I catch glimpses in the chaos. A shadow too large to be human, movement that’s too fluid to be machine. Claws glinting once in the strobe of the alarm. Another growl, deeper, angrier, the kind of sound that tells every instinct in me to run or be torn apart.
The guards don’t stand a chance. They drop one by one, silenced by force too brutal to mistake for anything sanctioned. The room reeks of gunpowder, blood, and something else, something primal that I can’t name.
I scramble toward the first door, the one I came through. It’s unguarded now. I swipe the card, praying it still works, and the lock clicks open. I spill into the hallway, sprinting down the stairs two at a time, lungs burning, the alarm still shrieking in my ears.
Behind me, another sound follows. Not boots. Not human. Heavy footfalls and that same growl, echoing down the steel corridor like it owns the space.
I don’t look back.
I don’t want to see what it belongs to.
I slam through the outer door into the night air, chest heaving, cold forest air flooding my lungs as I stumble into the trees. My hands shake as I clutch the phone against me, the pictures still saved inside, proof of everything I just witnessed.
But the sound stays with me even as I run. That growl, low and ancient, vibrating in my ribs like it marked me.
Not human. Not possible. And yet I heard it.
I felt it.
And I know deep in my bones that whatever saved me in there didn’t do it for mercy.
9
