Face-Slapping10 min read
My Cage, His Costly Claim
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I woke with a choking sound in my throat and the taste of iron in my mouth.
"Too tight," I whispered to the dark that had been pressed against my throat in the dream. "It hurts."
A black thing—no, a tail—coiled over me in that dream, cold as a river stone. It slid along my neck like a shadow with scales. It pressed until I could not breathe. When the tail flicked across my cheek, it turned into his face.
"You are for me," he said, and the voice was ice and hunger. "You are mine to own and to hurt."
I lurched upright in a sweat, every muscle ache-sore, lungs roaring. My legs buckled as if my bones had been turned to cotton. The memory of that man—hungry red eyes, the faint pattern of a serpent on the clothing—hung sticky and real.
The red curtain swung up like someone had torn open my life.
Light stabbed my eyelids. I raised my hands and squinted. I was sitting, but not in my room. I was in a cage—golden threads, a gilded prison hung on a stage. Men in suits and bad grins sat before me with paddles and numbers.
"Brand-new model," the auctioneer bellowed. "Still warm! Waterproof, maintenance free. Companionship, service, appearance—everything. Start at one million."
I tried to speak. My voice came out small, shredded by fear. I had no memory of how I had gotten here. My skin below the collarbone might be porcelain; above, my mind felt like a blank.
"I thought it was a robot!" someone laughed. "She looks so real."
They had dressed me in not enough fabric to pass as anything but a thing—two small scraps, a collar, stage makeup. My thighs were on display. My chest felt like a lamp whose bulb could be unscrewed.
Someone reached through the bars to touch my face.
I flinched. A dozen catcalls rose.
"Hey, pretty face," a heavy man said. "Ten million?"
I folded in on myself. They all seemed hungry. It was not hunger for food.
The man who had been in my dream arrived like a storm—no announcement, just the way his footfalls made people look away. He wore deep red, more shadow than cloth, and when he walked the air seemed to cool. Someone near the stage gulped.
"That's him?" a woman muttered. "Is that…"
"He is Boris Decker," somebody whispered. "Big money, dangerous."
Even under the bright auction lights, he looked dangerous. His eyes were a dark, bruised red. He paused at the edge of the stage and looked at me as if he could read my bones. A cold coil crawled down my spine.
"Don't you dare," some man beside me said aloud, and then he lunged with a hand toward my face.
Boris did not move fast. He moved as if the air itself answered him. He reached into his suit and tossed a black gold card like a knife.
The card sliced the man’s wrist. Blood bloomed under the stage lights.
"You think your hands belong on her?" Boris's voice dropped like a guillotine blade. "See the name."
He flicked the card. The cut had been clean, theatrical, all at once the man screamed and slid to the floor. Cameras flashed. People shouted. They had thought themselves masters; now they were spectators.
"One hundred million," Boris said, voice low as a storm. "She's mine. Start at one hundred million. Raise in fifty millions."
The auctioneer stammered, then obeyed. The paddles shook. Men who had been bold seconds ago shrank like animals on a plain when a lion walked through.
"Who is he?" I croaked. "Why—"
"You don't belong to them," Boris said, and for the first time his voice softened in a way that felt like a hand: not gentle, but possessive. "You belong to me."
I didn't have a name. I didn't know where I came from. He spoke something like it into the bright air and it sounded like an ownership claim.
"Anna Bates," he said, and when that name hit the cage, I felt something click in my ribs. "Anna Bates, remember this. You are Anna Bates."
He signed a check, black ink burning like a brand. The men with paddles fell silent. They had been playing at prizes, and he had played the house and won.
The man whose hand had bled—smeared on the stage—begged. He crawled on his hands, looking as cheap as he’d always been.
"Please—" he cried, dragging himself toward Boris. "I—"
Boris stepped forward. A hush moved like a physical thing across the hall.
"Your dirty hand," Boris said, and he held out the black card. "Is it worthy of touching her?"
The man laughed first, a little, then his eyes went glassy.
"Cut it," Boris said. It was not a request.
The lights were on me. My breath had sand in it. The man's bravado drained.
Boris took the card between two fingers and slid it over the man’s wrist again, this time with a patient cruelty. A chorus of gasps rose as red trickled and the man fell back, clutching at what remained.
"That very hand?" Boris said. He smiled then—a smile like a hinge of iron. "You will watch and learn your place."
He did not kill him on the spot. He made a spectacle.
The crowd leaned forward. Phones came out. A flash flared. The man who had once called himself entitled sobbed under the lights. People reached for their cameras. Hands covered mouths. Someone laughed like it was theater. Someone else swore. Others recorded.
"You're insane," the man gurgled, voice small. "It's—it's an accident."
"Accident?" Boris's laugh was a blade. "You think you deserve her? You think you deserve to touch what I buy?" He drew the long shadow of his eyes across the man's face. "You will pay—publicly."
The auctioneer was pale as a sheet. "Sir, we—"
"You offered her up like cattle," Boris said. "In this house, we settle a debt before we clap. Anyone else?"
No one raised a paddle. They all had seen the same thing: a man who could buy anything in the room. A man who could take their money and their dignity. A man who had snapped his fingers and reduced a bully to a puddle.
Boris's hands were steady when he reached toward the man. He didn't inflict more damage than he needed; he knew spectacle beats blood every time. He made a show of reading the man's face—his fear was a palette. He fingered the card against the man's palm, just once, and the man screamed, an animal sound trapped in velvet.
"Do you understand?" Boris said. He patted the card on the man's forehead like a priest offering absolution in reverse. "Never touch what is not yours. Never look at what you cannot have. You sold your dignity for a leash."
The man, delirious and blinking, mouthed something that might have been apology.
"You will beg," Boris told him. "You will post this—everywhere. You will tell them you deserved it. You will teach boys that appetite without consent is not funny. You will teach them in humiliation."
I didn't want to watch. I watched anyway.
The man began to speak, voice raw and shaking. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I—"
He laughed in that broken, hysteric way as the crowd recorded him; he crawled, he babbled, and with every word his dignity poured out in the lights and became entertainment for dozens of phones. A woman near the back wept quietly. Two men spoke in stunned whispers. Another man, braver perhaps or stupider, clapped his hands and chanted, "Shame! Shame!" The sound spread.
The man’s face went from sneer to stupefied denial to pleading. His chest heaved. "I didn't—"
"Stop." Boris's palm lay flat on the man's shoulder. He looked like someone closing a tired book. "You will remember this day. You will tell each man that you met—by name—you will tell them what you saw. You will not touch another girl's face without her permission."
"I—" the man sobbed. "I'll—I'll do it. I swear—"
"Swear to the cameras," Boris said. "Say it."
The man spat and cursed, then turned toward the sea of lenses. He gave his apology and confession like a confession in a public square, loud enough for every vendor and security guard to hear. The crowd murmured, some applauded, some only breathed. Phones circled like flies.
He knelt. His cheap suit was smeared in stage dust and his own blood. For longer than dignity would allow, he lay prostrate at the foot of the stage and begged for mercy. His voice broke. He rolled onto his side and vomited.
"No pity," Boris said to the room. "Pity teaches nothing."
A dozen people filmed him on their screens and posted. Within an hour in the city, the video would be a lesson, viral and ugly and instructive. By morning, he would be a name associated with his own disgrace.
"Take him out," Boris said. "And tell him he has one week to hand out apologies to every place he has ever touched. Film each one."
They dragged him off stage. He screamed and begged until the doors swallowed him. Cameras kept rolling. Someone who had been sneering earlier now lowered their phone. Someone else mouthed the word "karma" like prayer.
Even now, I can still feel the applause in my bones. Not the applause for the man, but the applause for a hand that would not be taken. For the way an unjust market had been interrupted.
He turned then and looked at me like I was the rest of his life.
"Anna," he said softly. "Don't be afraid."
He closed the cage and had someone carry me to a waiting car. I did not know whether to be terrorized or grateful.
"Where am I going?" I asked, voice a knot.
"Home," Boris said. "To my house. I will feed you. I will teach you to be human again."
"Will you hurt me?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Not if you are mine."
The next days were a layering of new normal—too many new things at once. I learned words like "deposit" and "ID" and "school," but memory was a thin film. My mornings tasted of milk and almonds and the faint spice of the room he kept me in. My name fit on my tongue the way a small key fits a lock. I am Anna Bates.
"Smile," he sometimes said, when the sunlight made his eyes softer.
"I don't know how," I said.
"Then I'll teach you," he would answer. "You will laugh for me."
He taught me to brush my teeth, to fold a napkin, how to hold a spoon. He taught me to accept warmth and touch in measured doses. He called himself by a name I learned to say as if it were a promise: "Boris."
"Why do you care?" I asked one night, fingers interlaced with his cool ones.
"Because you answer a hunger I could not starve." He looked at me like a man who had tracked a lone animal across a thousand years. "Because your voice is mine."
I believed him because there was no one else to believe.
School—Henrik Lewis's university lab—dawned like a new world. There I met Blake Li, who laughed like a bell and gave me spicy strips with the reverence of someone giving treasure. I learned the name "classmate" and the ache of being looked at. Boys tripped over each other when they discovered my face under a hat. I tried to keep my head down and my hands busy.
"I'll protect you," Boris warned, voice low as thunder after the coffee incident. "Don't trust them."
"I won't," I said, but I could not say why I was convinced to stay away from the kindness that others offered.
There were people who would not stop. A man thought I was a toy to be played with in a night club. They dragged me below to a place where lights beat like club thumps and the music made my ears bleed. They wanted me as entertainment, an ornament they could own for the price of a night.
I remember the smoky stage, the way the lights cut my skin. I remember the smell of cheap perfume. I remember, too, the sound of snapping glass as my fear turned into something else.
I will not lie: when I turned, when protection came, a terrible thing happened.
"Get her," the club owner had said. "Five hundred thousand—"
Then the world became a red smear and a cold hand closed around me. Figures lunged and I could not move. My body obeyed an old command I did not know it held. I reached outward, and the room shattered.
After, I leaned against Boris in the dark alley. "I killed them," I whispered.
"You defended yourself." He held me like a vow. "You are not evil."
But there was always retaliation. There was always consequence for the men who had dared to touch or to traffic or to buy human need as a profit. Boris did not let them live in dignity. He taught the city how quickly a predator could become spectacle, and how a market can be turned into a judgment.
He taught me too how to eat grapes and how to laugh.
"Try this," he said once in the garden that bent under the weight of black roses. He placed a cool grape at my lips. "Open."
"It is sweet," I said, and my laugh bloomed like a small, trembling flower.
"That's my girl," he said, and the way he said it made the sun tilt in my chest.
Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes I love him with a confusion that makes the world taste like iron and sugar together. He tells me the past is dangerous and that he has saved me from worse. He arms me with names and keeps me with chains of gold and velvet.
"Don't leave," he said one night. The brass of his voice vibrated against my sleeping head. "Nobody will take you from me."
"So keep me," I said, because I did not know what else to do.
When I speak now, I think of that man on the stage, the man with a cut hand, the owner of a thousand cancellations. I think of the phones in the crowd and the feed that spread his disgrace like wildfire. I think of Boris and how he keeps me behind glass and lace and a thousand gleams of coin.
"Will you ever let me go?" I ask when the night is soft.
He smiles like a blade.
"Only when you stop being mine."
I try to remember my life before the dream and the cage. Memory is a book with missing pages—sometimes I glance at the pictures and the edges are burned. I do not know who loved me or who wanted me dead before; I only know that my body remembers his touch and that when he is near, my heart obeys a law that is older than my fear.
If this is the life I have been dealt, then my grief is the price and my laughter its counterfeit coin.
But there is a truth that sits in the center of everything: I am not for sale. Not to men in suits, not to blunted eyes in nightclubs, not to the world that would buy a person like property.
"Never again," I promise at night to the quiet ceiling.
"Boris?" I ask, because pronouncing his name once more is like an ache.
"I will make sure," he answers, and his hands are warm on my face.
Outside, the city hums. Inside, I learn to say my name like a prayer and to eat grapes like a child. The world is both cruel and kind. The day I watched a man become spectacle for his appetite, the crowd learned that consent is a blade you cannot buy off. The man left the stage with blood and regret etched into him. Cameras kept him, and the city remembered.
I smile now sometimes because Boris taught me and because sometimes, in my dream, the snake-lover is no longer a predator. He becomes a keeper of vows. I do not know if that makes it better.
But I know this: when I say "I," I want it to mean me—not an object for a market, not a prize, not a possession. If I must live inside a cage to be safe, then I will learn to make that cage into a room where I can plant grapes and teach myself to laugh.
"Be careful," Boris once told me. "The world is greedy."
"I am learning to be greedy for myself," I say now, because saying it makes the sound of it real.
And he watches me with his slow, dangerous smile.
The End
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