Free The Cage by Ethan Cross

auburn hair fell around a smooth and angelic face. Her eyes shone like emeralds speckled with tiny flecks of golden caramel and possessed a strength that he had found arresting.
    In that moment, he had felt something for her, a stirring of some still-human part of himself that his father had been unable to filter out entirely. In that moment, he had loved her. At least he thought that was what it was. The emotion had been so alien to him that its true source was unknowable.
    As he had stared into her eyes, foreign feelings swirling inside his mind, a part of him had wanted her to grow up and be happy, to live a normal life and be afforded the opportunities that had been stolen from him. He loved her, and although he knew the emotions would never be reciprocated, he wanted someone else to know what he felt in that moment. He wanted her to look into someone else’s eyes and feel that same stirring. Then, in a way, it would be like she was experiencing the strange emotions in regard to him, since he had given her life and the opportunity to live it.
    But now he knew that by murdering her family he had stolen from her any hope of normalcy in the same way that his father’s actions had affected him. They were forever conjoined through their shared pain of an ordinary life lost. The thought filled him with sadness. He was truly a monster, just as he had been told over and over again.
    The sound of someone splashing through the water and heading in his direction interrupted his thoughts. With Jennifer still vivid in his mind, the men approaching seemed unimportant. But he pushed away the memories and focused on the task at hand.
    It was time to play.

David pressed forward down the shadowy corridor. Debris from the crumbling walls littered his path, and he’d seen trash left by the work crew floating by in the beam of his flashlight. He tried to move as soundlessly as possible, but he knew that anyone listening in the darkness would hear his progress and be warned of his approach, if not his exact location.
    Then a noise echoed from behind him.
    He immediately clicked off his light and ducked into an open doorway. With his back pressed against the wall, he listened for movement and readied his shotgun.
    Another sound.
    A bumping of debris?
    He reasoned that the sound was the collision of two floating items. The impact could have been entirely innocuous, but it could also have been a disturbance in the water caused by a person’s movement.
    He waited in the darkness, in the silence. He heard only the normal white noise of the basement, the gentle swirling of the water, and the hiss of the rain.
    Realizing that he had been holding his breath, he exhaled slowly. The danger could have been imagined; he had no evidence to indicate otherwise. But the soldier in him wondered if a deadly enemy stood just out of sight, waiting for him to make a mistake and give away his position. If that was the case, the most patient hunter would win.
    But it could be nothing, and he had no way of knowing for sure. Indecision racked his brain. He felt his chest tightening, dizziness closing in around him.
    Not now .
    The panic attack danced at the edges of his mind, but he fought hard against the onslaught. Images from Samarra swept over him. Blood pounded in his ears. A recurring vision of one of the soldiers under his command flashed before him. Lying only five feet away, wounded and dying, the man’s eyes begged for help; his hand reached out to David for salvation.
    But he hadn’t saved him. He had hidden and then run.
    Gritting his teeth, he shook the images away.
    And then it came: another noise.
    This sound suggested movement through the water, and a shadowy figure walking past his doorway confirmed the conjecture.
    So as not to draw attention with the movement, he slowly raised the shotgun, sighted in, and caressed the trigger. Sweat poured down the side of his face, and his heart thundered against his rib cage. It was now or never.
    He began