Chapter 2: The Collar and the Chase
The car door shutting was the loudest sound in the world. Then there was only the hum of the engine and Hannah’s ragged breathing, which sounded less like breath and more like a damaged bellows straining in her chest.
Natasha watched through the tinted window as the pale, naked form vanished between two hedges lining the driveway. The night swallowed her whole.
“Drive. One block. Lights off,” Wanda said, her voice flat. The car rolled forward silently, stopping under the canopy of an old oak. From here, they had a narrow sightline down the side street adjacent to their property.
Silence settled, thick and charged. Natasha’s fingers were cold. She twisted them in her lap. “The chip… Wanda, you didn’t even sterilize the site.”
“It’s self-sanitizing. Nano-coating.” Wanda’s eyes were fixed on the darkness. “She’s a flight risk. And a predation risk. This is containment.”
“She’s not a fugitive. She’s our…”
“Our what, Natasha?” Wanda finally looked at her, the green of her eyes sharp in the dashboard’s glow. “Use the word. Our daughter? She’s nineteen. She has the emotional regulation of a cornered fox and a biological need for human blood. The adoption paperwork we’ve started is for a six-year-old from Krasnoyarsk. This,” she gestured toward the window, “is something else. We own a profoundly dangerous living weapon. We can care for it without lying to ourselves about what it is.”
The words were clinical, dissecting. They left a metallic taste in Natasha’s mouth. She wanted to argue, to summon a courtroom’s worth of mitigating circumstances. But the ghost of Hannah’s snarling face, the animalistic switch from sleepy confusion to bared-teeth rage, played behind her eyes. The safety clicking off Wanda’s gun had been the most rational sound in the car.
A scream cut through the night. It was short, choked, then silenced.
Natasha jerked forward. Wanda’s hand shot out, not to comfort, but to press her back against the seat. “Wait.”
Two minutes passed. The night insects resumed their chirping.
Then, a shape detached from the deeper shadows near a neighbor’s landscaping shed. Hannah moved differently now. There was a liquid grace to her steps, a purposeful stealth that felt innate, not learned. She was still naked, but something dark painted her mouth and chin, glistening under the scant moonlight. She held something in her hand—a rag, maybe a piece of cloth—which she used to wipe her face as she walked. Her head was up, scenting the air.
She crossed the street without looking and came directly to the car, as if pulled by a homing signal. She stopped by Wanda’s window.
Wanda powered it down. The cool, damp air rushed in, carrying the coppery, salt-rich scent of fresh blood.
Hannah’s eyes were lambent, pupils hugely dilated. The frantic energy was gone, replaced by a eerie, satiated calm. The blood had been clumsily wiped, leaving smears across her cheeks and neck. She dropped the cloth—a stained kitchen towel—onto the pavement.
“It was a man,” she said, her voice lower, smoother. The rasp was still there, but it was muted, as if the feed had oiled her throat. “Walking his dog. I took the dog’s collar off first. So it would run home. Then I took the man from behind. The jugular. It’s fast.” She recited it like a field report. “He’s in the bushes. He’ll live. Probably. I didn’t take too much.”
Natasha felt a surreal disconnect. This was a conversation happening. About a crime. In her quiet, multimillion-dollar neighborhood.
“Did he see you?” Wanda asked.
Hannah shook her head, her silver hair catching the light. “From behind. And I was gone before he fell. He’ll remember… a pressure. A nightmare.” She blinked slowly, a lizard on a warm rock. “The itch is quiet now.”
“Get in,” Wanda said.
Hannah slid into the seat beside Natasha, immediately drawing her knees up. She was cold, a solid block of chilled flesh radiating the night’s damp. The blood smell filled the cabin, intimate and gross. Natasha saw a single drop, almost black, tremble at the point of Hannah’s chin. Without thinking, she reached into her purse, pulled out a travel pack of sanitizing wipes, and tore it open.
Hannah flinched back, her body coiling. “Don’t.”
“You’re covered in it,” Natasha said, keeping her voice steady. She held the wipe aloft. “It’s just to clean you off.”
Hannah stared at the white cloth, then at Natasha’s face. The suspicion was a physical wall. Slowly, hesitantly, she leaned forward, her eyes wide and unblinking, tracking Natasha’s every micro-movement.
Natasha reached out. The skin of Hannah’s cheek was shockingly soft, like the finest kid leather, and cold. She wiped gently, first the chin, then the smears on her cheek. The blood came away in rust-brown streaks. Hannah stayed perfectly still, her breath held. It was the most submissive thing Natasha had seen her do.
“See? Not a test,” Natasha murmured.
“Everything’s a test,” Hannah whispered back, but she let Natasha clean the other cheek and her neck.
Wanda watched the exchange, her expression unreadable. She gave the driver a quiet command, and the car moved the final hundred yards to the garage beneath the house.
The mansion was a study in controlled minimalism. Cold white marble floors, floating staircases, vast abstract art on the walls. Their footsteps echoed. Hannah, walking barefoot, left faint, damp footprints. She stared at everything—the high ceiling, the stark sculptural light fixture, the wall of glass looking out to the lit swimming pool—with the analytical detachment of a burglar casing the place.
“This is a museum,” she stated.
“It’s a home,” Natasha corrected, leading her toward a hallway off the main living area.
“Where’s my room? The one with a window?”
“This way.”
The room was not a cell. It was a guest suite, spacious and serene, done in shades of cream and pale grey. A large bed with a crisp linen duvet, a low dresser, a desk. And, as promised, a floor-to-ceiling window looking out into a private, walled garden currently bathed in moonlight.
Hannah walked directly to the window and pressed her palms and forehead against the cool glass, fogging it with her breath. She stayed like that for a long moment. “The sky is bigger here,” she said, her voice small.
“The bathroom is through there,” Natasha said, pointing to a door. “There are towels. You should shower. I’ll find you something to wear.”
Hannah turned from the window. Her eyes were on the bed. “I sleep on the floor. Usually. Beds are… too much.”
“You’ll sleep here,” Wanda said from the doorway. She hadn’t followed them in, just leaned against the frame, a silhouette of authority. “Rule one: You use what we provide. Bed, clothes, food. You don’t revert to old habits without permission.”
Hannah’s head tilted. “Permission for what?”
“For everything. Until we know each other. You leave this room without one of us, you violate the perimeter of the property, you hunt, you harm anything—you ask first. The chip will tell me if you lie.”
The word chip made Hannah’s hand fly to the back of her neck. She prodded the small, raised bump there, her expression darkening. “You tagged me. Like an animal.”
“Yes,” Wanda said, simply. “For your safety and ours. The rule stands. Ask.”
The air tightened. Natasha saw the shift begin—the slight tremor in Hannah’s jaw, the way her bright eyes started to film over with something colder. The other one, knocking.
“Hannah,” Natasha said, stepping forward, cutting the tension between her and Wanda. “What do you need right now? Besides the shower.”
The focus swung to her. The gathering storm in Hannah’s eyes hesitated. She blinked. “I’m… sticky. The blood. It gets stiff. I don’t like it when it’s stiff.”
“Then shower. I’ll get clothes.”
Hannah looked from Natasha to Wanda and back, performing some internal calculus. The storm receded, replaced by a wary acceptance. She gave a sharp, single nod and padded into the bathroom. The lock clicked, a tiny, definitive sound.
Natasha let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She turned to Wanda. “‘Ask for everything’? You’re treating her like a soldier on a leash.”
“She is a soldier,” Wanda replied, pushing off the doorframe and walking into the room. She ran a finger along the pristine duvet. “A feral, undisciplined one. Leashes and clear commands are what she understands. Chaos is her native language. We have to speak it, but with better grammar.” She looked at Natasha, her gaze softening a fraction. “The cleaning. That was good. That was… a different language.”
Natasha went to the dresser in the room and pulled out a soft pair of lounge pants and a simple t-shirt. They would swim on Hannah’s slight frame. She laid them on the bed just as the shower turned off with a hollow shudder through the pipes.
Minutes later, the bathroom door opened. Steam billowed out, and Hannah emerged, skin pink from heat, her grey hair plastered darkly to her skull. She was clean. The scent of blood was gone, replaced by the neutral smell of almond soap. She saw the clothes on the bed and moved to them, touching the fabric of the shirt with something like reverence.
“These are… new.”
“They’re yours,” Natasha said.
Hannah pulled the shirt on, drowning in it. She rolled the sleeves up multiple times. The pants were worse, pooling around her ankles. She stood there, a child in adult clothing, looking lost.
Wanda watched, then turned. “Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning. Your door will not be locked. Do not make me regret that.”
She left, her heels clicking away down the hall.
Natasha lingered. “Do you need anything else?”
Hannah was staring at the bed again, a battlefield in cream linen. “What if I break it?”
“The bed?”
“The… this. The room. The window. You.” She said it plainly. “What if the other one comes out and breaks it?”
Natasha moved closer, stopping a few feet away. “Then we’ll manage it. Together. Breaking things isn’t a one-way ticket out of here, Hannah. It’s a problem we solve.”
Hannah’s breath hitched, a tiny, broken sound. She looked at Natasha, and for a fleeting second, the walls were utterly down. She looked nineteen. She looked terrified. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“We don’t either,” Natasha admitted, offering a small, real smile. “So we’ll learn. Goodnight.”
She turned off the main light, leaving only a small lamp on by the desk. As she reached the door, Hannah’s raspy voice stopped her.
“Natasha?”
“Yes?”
“The window. Thank you.”
Natasha nodded, her throat tight, and pulled the door shut behind her. She stood in the quiet hall, listening. No sound came from the room. No tearing, no sobs. Just a profound, waiting silence.
She found Wanda in their bedroom, already out of her jacket, staring out at the night. Natasha came up behind her, pressing her forehead between Wanda’s shoulder blades.
“She thanked me for the window,” Natasha whispered.
Wanda’s hand came up to cover Natasha’s where they wrapped around her waist. Her grip was firm. “I know.”
“She’s just a kid.”
“I know that, too.” Wanda turned, her face etched with a rare fatigue. The unflappable mask was down. “She’s also a nuclear reactor on a shaky foundation. We just brought her into our home. The fallout…”
“We’ll manage it,” Natasha echoed her own words, leaning up to kiss her. It was a promise, a plea, and a surrender all at once.
Down the hall, in the moonlit room, Hannah did not sleep. She sat on the very edge of the bed, the too-big clothes swallowed by her knees. She watched the moon travel across her window, her hand pressed against the glass, feeling the vast, terrifying freedom of the sky outside, and the new, inexplicable weight of the walls around her.
The soft cotton of the shirt felt like a swarm of ants on her skin. The bed’s crisp linen was a suffocating cloud, smelling of floral detergent and a peace she couldn’t metabolize. Every fiber of this calm, clean room screamed of a trap disguised as kindness. Princess treatment. It was a form of drowning.
She ripped the shirt over her head, the seams giving way with a satisfying tear. The pants followed, shredded with a focused violence. The duvet was next. She clawed the cover off, yanking at the sheets until they came free in a tangle. She didn’t just strip the bed; she dismantled it, heaping the fabrics into a chaotic nest in the corner. The act was oxygen. The weight in her chest loosened.
The window opened without a sound. The cool night air kissed her bare skin, a familiar lover. She dropped onto the dew-wet grass, a pale ghost flitting across the manicured lawn, over the high wall with simian grace, and into the welcoming darkness of the wooded preserve behind the property.
The forest was a cathedral of shadows and scent. Here, her breathing finally synced with the world. She moved silently, a phantom, every sense dialed to a primal frequency. The itch beneath her skin, momentarily quieted by the man’s blood, was a low hum again—a need for something purer, less complicated by guilt and witnesses.
She found the deer at a clearing’s edge, a young buck drinking from a streambed. It was beautiful. She felt no sentimentality, only a sharp, clean focus. The hunt was swift and efficient. A snapped neck, a warm body collapsing into the ferns. It was nothing like the frantic, guilty takings from city streets. This was ritual.
Dragging it back was work. She left a smeared trail through the undergrowth, hauling the carcass over the wall, across the lawn. She didn’t try to hide. This was her offering, her truth. She left it directly before the floor-to-ceiling window, a dark mound against the glass.
Then she fed.
Kneeling in the damp grass, she bent to the kill. The blood was hot and rich, an iron-tinged river that filled the hollow ache inside her. It coated her chin, her chest, her hands, painting her in a glistening second skin. This was comfort. This was real.
Exhaustion, deep and cellular, washed over her. She didn’t re-enter the house. She nudged the torn, bloodied sheets from her nest with her foot, wanting nothing between her and the reality she’d built. She curled on the hard, cool floorboards, her body nestled against the deer’s still-warm flank, her cheek resting on its hide. One hand remained curled around a rent in its neck, a child clinging to a ragged stuffed toy. Sleep took her there, in the moonlight, painted in blood, finally at peace in her own private carnage.
The morning light through the window was a brutal interrogator. It fell first on the deer’s glassy, open eye, then on the scene of archaic ruin inside the room.
Natasha found it. She’d come quietly, carrying a tray with orange juice and toast, a ridiculous, hopeful gesture. The door swung open and her breath vanished.
For a full ten seconds, her brain refused to assemble the narrative. The destroyed bedding. The eviscerated clothes. The magnificent, dead animal outside, a still-life of violation against their pristine garden. And Hannah, curled naked and bloody on the floor, sleeping with an obscene intimacy against the carcass.
A small, choked sound escaped her. She backed out, pulling the door shut with infinite care, and walked stiffly down the hall.
Wanda was at the kitchen island, reviewing a security tablet, a cup of black coffee steaming beside her. She looked up. “Did she eat the—”
“You need to come,” Natasha interrupted, her voice thin. “Now. And bring a… a tarp. Or something.”
Wanda read her face, a skill honed over a decade. She set the tablet down without a word and followed.
She opened the door herself. She took in the entire scene in one sweeping, analytical glance. Her expression didn’t change, but a muscle in her jaw ticked once. She stepped over the threshold, her heels avoiding a patch of blood Hannah had tracked in.
“Well,” Wanda said, her voice low and flat. “She doesn’t like the decor.”
“Wanda, for God’s sake—”
“She hunted. She fed. She brought the leftovers home. She’s marking her territory.” Wanda crouched, not touching anything, examining the scene like a forensic investigator. “It’s logical. Brutal, but logical. She’s showing us what she is, because she thinks our nice sheets are a lie.”
Hannah stirred. A low, animal sound rumbled in her throat. Her eyes opened, the bright grey irises clouded with sleep, then instantly clear. She saw them. She didn’t startle. She slowly uncurled, sitting up, blood flaking from her skin like old paint.
She looked from the deer outside, to her own stained hands, to the nest of destroyed linens, and finally to their faces. Her chin lifted, a defiant challenge etched in dried gore.
“I don’t want a princess room,” she rasped, the morning gravel in her voice. “They gave me a princess room in the last lab. Before the shock therapy started.”
Natasha’s heart clenched. Wanda remained crouched, her gaze level.
“So you made a butcher’s shop,” Wanda stated.
“It’s honest,” Hannah shot back, her eyes glinting.
“It’s a biohazard,” Wanda corrected, standing. “And it’s wasting good meat.” She turned to Natasha, all business. “Call Viktor. Tell him to bring a kit to clean this and to field dress the deer. We’ll have venison.”
Natasha stared, her mind reeling. “You’re… we’re going to eat it?”
“We’re not wasting a clean kill.” Wanda looked back at Hannah, who was watching them with feral curiosity. “You took it from our land. That makes it ours. You don’t get to decide how the whole thing is used. Rule two: You make a mess, you help clean it. Not with your mouth. With soap and water.”
Hannah blinked, thrown. Her defiant script had no reply for this. “You’re not mad?”
“I’m evaluating,” Wanda said. “The hunting was competent. The tracking, dragging it here, shows initiative. The destruction of property is childish. We’ll replace the sheets with something more durable. The clothes were yours to destroy. That’s your business.” She stepped closer, her shadow falling over Hannah. “But you left the perimeter without asking. You violated rule one.”
Hannah’s bravado faltered. She looked down at her bloody hands. “The itch was back.”
“Then you ask.” Wanda’s voice allowed no argument. “You come to one of us and you say ‘the itch is back.’ We will handle it. That is the deal. You broke it.”
Silence hung, thick with the smell of blood and damp grass.
“What’s the punishment?” Hannah whispered, almost eagerly, as if this was a familiar, comfortable script.
Wanda considered her. “You will clean this room. Every drop, every speck. Then you will shower. Then you will come downstairs, and you will help prepare the meat from your kill. You will learn what happens after the blood.”
Hannah’s eyes widened. This wasn’t a beating. It wasn’t isolation. It was a chore. It was… participation. It was utterly, bafflingly mundane.
Natasha finally found her voice, soft but firm. “And after that, we’re going shopping. For sheets that can be washed in bleach. And for clothes you can actually move in.”
“Okay,” she said, the word small and rough.Good,” Wanda said, and turned to leave. “Start cleanin. The supplies are under the sink.”She walked out, leaving Natasha in the doorway. Natasha offered Hannah a look that wasn’t a smile, but wasn’t condemnation either. It was simply presence. Then she followed her wife, pulling the door shut behind her, leaving Hannah alone with the carcass, the mess, and the first confusing thread of something that wasn’t a rule, but a rhythm.