Badlands: The Lion’s Den(15)

“Let’s go. Up to my apartment. I’m done for the night,” he said to her, his voice raspy. He saw her look of confusion and worry, and it hurt him to the core.

* * * * *

The apartment was located right behind the Lion’s Den. To get there, all they had to do was go through a door at the back of the club, down a hallway, and up a flight of stairs.

Finn flung the front door open and Flora strode in, looking around curiously.

The living room/kitchen was utilitarian and completely impersonal.

There was a black leather sofa and matching armchair and a beat-up wooden coffee table facing a wall-mounted TV set, and a bookcase stocked with a couple of dozen well-worn military history books and thrillers. The window had blackout curtains, Flora noticed. The kitchen had a small, square wooden table and two chairs.

There was one picture on a shelf of the bookcase, of a military squadron in some desert country. The picture frame was black.

So, he had suffered a terrible loss. Given the sudden grim look on Finn’s face, now did not seem like the appropriate time to ask about it.

Other than that one photograph, there were no family pictures, no knick-knacks, no trophies – nothing that spoke of his personality or his tastes, or what he loved and treasured.

Flora thought the room felt hard and lonely. She thought back to her own room, living on the farm with her family and then at the Wilkinsons’. She’d never had money, but she’d always managed to personalize her little space. She’d put wildflowers in Mason jars. She’d fished old pictures from trash heaps and painted the frames with leftover paint jars purchased at a steep discount from the hardware store, and she’d framed pictures from discarded magazines or decorative fabric that she’d bought from thrift stores.

“Be it ever so humble,” Finn said, gesturing at the room.

Flora laughed. “And there I always dreamed of mating for money.”

“Did you?”

She smiled at him. “No, silly. I just dreamed of being able to choose who I’d want to choose.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

It certainly did. But from the age of sixteen, she’d been told who she was going to be mated with. She’d been told how lucky she was that a man like Loren Haig would even look at her, when he could have anyone – the implication being that he was mating down. And she was mating up.

And then she’d found out exactly what kind of man Loren Haig really was. She shuddered and hugged herself.

That bastard will never father my cubs.

“Is it really that bad?” Finn asked, and she realized she was scowling.

“No, no,” she said quickly. “Really. Before I came here, I lived out in the middle of nowhere in a farmhouse with no electricity, and shared one bedroom with two other women.” Two women she’d grown up with and thought were friends. “I was just having a bad memory flashback.” Anxious to change the subject, she looked at his TV. “You guys actually get TV reception here?”

“Yeah, we can pick up satellite signals. We have all the equipment from before the last government crackdown, and stuff gets smuggled in on the regular. Weapons, medicine, cars…everything. That’s how I got my books.” At her shocked look, he added with amusement, “You’re surprised? It’s a state full of rebels and outlaws.”

“True,” she said, nodding.

Finn stood there awkwardly, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself now that there was another person in the apartment. Maybe he didn’t have guests here that often. That thought made her feel oddly happy. Special. It would be so nice to be special to someone, rather than a burden.

“So you won’t have to worry about missing Vampire Diaries, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, or whatever your addiction is,” he said.

“Vampire what? Keeping up with who?”

He looked at her, puzzled. “You literally don’t know who I’m talking about? Nobody in your town watched TV?”

“When I was fourteen, my family sent me off to live with another pride. They were these back-to-the-land types who didn’t have electricity or anything.”

“Why’d they do that?”

Why indeed. The memory still stung. Ripped away from her school, her friends, her community… And nobody had even missed her when she was gone.

She shrugged lightly. “I was the only girl. There were twelve of us. My brothers were helpful on the farm. I guess I wasn’t. My family couldn’t really afford me.” And apparently, as she’d found out a year ago, it had been very lucrative to give her up.

“Didn’t you go to school?”

“The Wilkinsons homeschooled us all.”