Free (Un)wise by Melissa Haag Page B

room.”
    “Fine.”
    His easy agreement didn’t help settle my nerves, but I still followed him into the office.  He paid cash for the room and led the way back outside.  A sidewalk, protected by the eves, ran along the building.  We didn’t follow it far.  He stopped at the door marked with a two.  Too close to the office for my comfort.
    “I got kicked out of one hotel already.  He’s going to hear me for sure.”
    “Maybe you won’t have bad dreams,” Luke said as he unlocked the door and stepped aside so I could enter.
    I snorted but didn’t bother disagreeing with him.  I entered the room then turned to look at him with an arched brow.  He still stood there with his hand on the doorknob.
    “I’ll sit on the bench outside and wake you in a few hours.” He started to close the door.
    “The key?” Seriously.  Did he really think I would be okay with him keeping it?
    He smiled.  “I’ll hold onto it.  Better I wake you when you start getting too loud than the owner.”
    I scowled and opened my mouth to argue, but he closed the door too fast.  I started at it for a moment.  Could I do this?  Could I fall asleep with one of them close by?  What could he do to me while I was sleeping that he couldn’t do while awake?  Nothing, really.  It just made me feel so vulnerable.
    Behind me, the mattress sang its siren song luring me enough to turn toward it.  It didn’t matter that Luke had a key.  He could easily break through the door without it.  After all, he’d snuck into one hotel room already.
    Kicking off my shoes, I did my usual belly dive into the quilt and closed my eyes with my feet still hanging off the end of the bed.  This wouldn’t last more than a few...
    The dream that claimed me had a new twist. It split into four views of the same thing.  I was my current self, yet at the same time, I was all three of other girls in the dream.  Disoriented by all four viewpoints, I struggled, trying to focus on just one.
    I crouched in my pen with three other girls.  Branches, thicker than any of our arms, jabbed into the ground to make the walls of our pen.  Trees towered around us.  Sunlight occasionally speckled the ground as the canopy above shifted.
    The stench of our feces and unwashed bodies clogged my nose.  We’d been kept in the pen for seven days.  The youngest girl, with the strawberry blonde hair, had been first.  She placed the earthen floor as she glared at our captors who lounged languidly beyond our pen wall.  Her tiny stature and youth didn’t make her very menacing, yet.  But when she hit puberty, she would be a force to reckon with.
    The most recent captive sobbed softly.  Still in her teens but older than all of us, she’d been made to Claim then mate with someone.  She kept her eyes fixed on the ground.  I sat next to her with an arm around her shoulders.  And, like the youngest, I watched our captors.
    The fourth member of the party slept and twitched as she did so.
    I felt the pain and anguish of the one crying, the rage of the one pacing, the determination of the one holding her sister, and the pure terror of the one dreaming.  We were all the same yet different.  Sisters of the same womb.  Daughters of the Taupe Lady.  Pieces in a game we never wanted to play.
    The branch door of our pen drifted open in the breeze.  None of us moved to run, but it still caught the attention of the men watching us.
    “If she is old enough to look at us with hate, she is old enough to mate,” one said as he stood.  He towered over all of us.  A scrap of leather covered his loins.  The rest of him remained dusty and bare.
    The sister who paced stopped moving and stared at him, her chin tucked close to her chest so she watched him from under her brow.  He strode purposely toward her.
    The dream narrowed so I no longer felt the other three.  Just her.  Just her anger.  Her fear.  She knew what he wanted.  What he intended to do.  She would die.
    He