Ready Or Not

One Very Incarcerated Sister

**Theo**

“Montgomery,” I spat, annoyed. “M-o-n-t-g-o-m-e-r-y. It’s not hard. We were here last night and you wouldn’t let us see her.”

“Shift changed, Theo,” Anna reminded me.

“They all look the same to me,” I grumped.

“Do not,” Daniel said, laughing quietly. “Or you would have had no interest in me.”

He pushed me aside and straightened his posture, looking and sounding a lot more respectable than I did.

“We were told she could have visitors today. Lydia Montgomery, just like my other half spelled out.”

The woman behind the desk lifted an eyebrow at him, but typed something into her computer. I hadn’t even gotten that far with her. I wondered how many vampires they had locked up. I doubted she really needed to look anything up to be able to tell us Lydia was, in fact, there, and indeed able to take visitors.

“She’s here,” the officer said. “Taking visitors. But only for limited amounts of time. You don’t get to spend all day with her, and she stays behind the glass, restrained.”

Restrained? How exactly did they pull that off? And how dare they?

“Understood, ma’am,” said Daniel congenially. “Thank you.”

I growled low. I doubt the woman heard me, but Anna and Daniel did, and they both shot me a look.

“Behave, Teodoro,” Anna said before giving her name and getting handed some kind of tag on a lanyard.

I got one next, and then Daniel, and they took the three of us down a series of hallways. The place was bigger than it looked from the outside. They led us to a sterile looking room and we sank into creaking plastic chairs and proceeded to wait.

A thick glass wall ran the length of the room, its purpose immediately clear - to keep me from my Lydia. A clock ticked annoyingly on the opposite wall, its purpose, apparently, to remind us that we had very little time with her. They certainly weren’t in any hurry to deliver her to us, and I wondered, irritably, what could possibly be taking so long. Did she have to make herself presentable? Powder her nose?

Likely they just knew that wasting time would be a sort of punishment on its own to Lydia, but finally, I heard her.

Anna and Daniel perked up at the familiar sound of her voice.

“I swear to Christ...can we please just move?” she was asking.

It would have been a relief to hear her voice had it not been accompanied by the rattle and scrape of metal.

Restrained, I thought. Fuck.

And then we saw her. Chains from ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, elbow to elbow. They had her neck chained. She had three escorts with her. And she looked tired, and she looked embarrassed. Embarrassed was not a look I’d seen on her since the first few months after we met, and I was fuming.

I jumped out of my seat. “What the fuck is that? Did you forget her fucking muzzle? Why is she chained up like an animal?”

I knew. Of course I knew. To a lot of people, that’s exactly what she was, and she was a threat. But the chains wouldn’t hold her if she really wanted to hurt somebody. They were there, at least in part, to humiliate her.

“It’s okay, doll,” Lydia said, trying to soothe me.

“It’s not!” I insisted.

“Sweetheart, calm down. We’re wasting time,” Daniel said, hand on my elbow, pulling me to a chair closer to the glass. Lydia was taking a seat on the other side, just out of my reach. I hated it. Hated that the distance could be so vast when the space between us was so little.