When the door shut behind big Belle, I went back to work on my strap. What she and her mistress hadn’t realized was that not only was my hand growing back, but I now had movement in the regenerating fingers. The thick gray skin of my demon body might have been striped like a gazelle’s, but my hands were weaponized, with curved black nails sharp and heavy as parrots’ beaks on the good hand. The claws were much less impressive on the hand that was growing back, but if I twisted it until it hurt so badly it felt like Block was biting it off all over again, I could just touch the strap around that arm with my index fingernail.

It was a start. I decided that if I sawed away for a long stretch, ignoring the pain (and good lord, was it painful) I might be able to fray the edge of the strap that held my wounded arm to the headboard of the bed. The leather was thick, and after an hour or so my claw was too dull to do any more work, but I found out that if I performed another agonizing stretch in a different direction, I could rub the claw against the metal bedpost and eventually put enough of an edge on it to get back to work.

Needless to say, this was slow, achingly miserable work, and the chances I would survive long enough to get all the way through the strap were minimal, but I didn’t have a better plan. Lady Zinc and her servant were both crazy. Nobody was going to rescue me, and I was getting weaker by the hour. It was ironic, really: Vera had saved me when I was bleeding to death and nursed me back to health, but now she was taking something at least as vital from me, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was. It wasn’t just my precious bodily fluids, it seemed to be my very essence, and there was less of it each time she drained me.

Big Belle had just finished tightening the straps on my good arm one night—I was so weak they didn’t even bother to tie my ankles anymore—when I gasped out a question: Why did she and Vera hate men so much?