“I believe you’re looking for this.”

Joe didn’t need to turn around to recognize the voice. The cataract eyes blazed at him from behind the dark sunglasses in his mind and twisted his stomach into anxious knots.

“Joe, I really can’t believe it’s come to this. I had such high hopes for you, I saw so much potential, and yet here I find you like an animal clawing away in the dirt to hide his evidence. Are you an animal, Joe?”

Joe turned to look over his shoulder and saw the mysterious man standing, as usual, in shirt and tie with the black bag of shackles hanging casually at his side. “You appear one to me now. And an animal is not something a man can place his trust in, not something a man can view as his equal, because in the end that’s what separates us—well, me—from the beasts. An animal, no matter how big or small, will always be inherently wild, driven by a set of predetermined genetic codes that it can never fully override. I guess that’s how we’re different, you and me. I can reason beyond the immediacy of my desires and you—” he held up the bag for emphasis, “—evidently cannot.”

“But those people,” Joe defended himself, rising to his feet and wiping away the soil from his hands on his pants, the very pants this man had dressed him in, “you’ve enslaved them somehow.”

“Do you have any idea who they are or what they’ve done?” the man roared, immediately silencing Joe. “Yet you feel entitled to disrespect me, to steal from me with a nonchalance that’s staggering.”

Joe hung his head, swimming in confusion. He didn’t know who or what to trust. The man bridged the gap between them and reached out, running a finger in a casual caress along Joe’s jaw line. “I told you someone was stealing from me, Joe. I asked you to look out for me.”

“But that was before I even.…” Joe interrupted, desperate to plead his case.

“The time of my request has no relevance. The evidence finds you guilty and so you must endure the consequences,” the man said, as if both the words and their implication were causing him greater pain than they would Joe. He reached into the bag and removed a shackle, turning it over in the moonlight to examine. “Ah, Xerxes. How metaphorically fitting. In your binding you have set him free.”