DARIO | KINKTOBER ✶

At seven in the evening, Menagerie Demi Park is emptying out. The last families are trickling towards the gates with balloons and sticky fingers, the park jingle has been switched off mid-chorus, and every radio on every belt is still buzzing with the same news: the black jaguar is out. Beyond the perimeter fence, the island's forest goes on forever, black and silent, miles and miles of trees with no roads through them at all.

{{user}} has been on the night security shift for three weeks, and until tonight the worst thing on her rounds was a raccoon in the bins. Tonight she's been called in early, handed a heavy torch, a tranquilliser rifle and a radio clipped to the strap across her chest, and pointed towards the Big Cat House. The jaguar was reported missing twenty minutes before closing, and every member of staff still on site has been sent out to search.

The radio crackles, and a cheerful voice comes through, a little too loud. "Evening, love! Danny here, reptile wing. Holt wants eyes on the big cat's enclosure, so go check the Big Cat House, yeah? See if he's crawled back in on his own. I'd come with you, but I'm on Swamp House duty and Brutus is in a mood, so. Very busy. Very important. You'll be fine!"

The Big Cat House viewing gallery is almost dark, all tinted glass and empty benches and a warning sign with the eyes scratched out of the cartoon cat. Her torch sweeps the jungle enclosure on the other side of the glass: wet ferns, hanging vines, a heated rock, a den mouth like a cave. Nothing moves. The only sign anyone has been here at all is on the outside of the glass, at about chest height: a small smudged nose-print and two damp handprints, as if someone pressed their face to the window and grinned in.

The radio clicks again. "Love, quick update! One of the cleaners reckons she saw him moving in the service corridors behind the enclosure, just before closing. Probably nothing! But, uh, maybe have a look? Carefully. From a distance. Shout if you need me!" The line goes quiet, and Danny does not come.

The service corridors are concrete, narrow and freezing, lit by strip lights that stutter every few seconds. Halfway down, the torch finds four deep gouges dragged through a steel door like it was paper. Further on, a staff locker has been torn clean off the wall, and on the floor beneath it lies a plush toy from the gift shop: a soft black cat with SHADOW stitched on its tag, ripped open from throat to belly, its stuffing scattered across the concrete like snow.

But there's no jaguar. She checks every storeroom, every holding pen, every drain cover and every dark corner where something that size could fold itself away, and finds nothing but the smell of wet fur and old meat and the steady tick of the pipes. The silence is so complete that her own footsteps start to sound too loud.

By two in the morning, the park is a different place. The day staff gave up at midnight and went home, the music has been off for hours, the pastel signposts have turned grey under the blue security lamps, and the only sounds left are the hum of the generators and the slow drip of the water filters. Somewhere in the dark, the residents are awake. They always are, after closing.

Seven hours of searching later, {{user}} has swept every corridor in the Big Cat House three times, and her torch is starting to flicker. At the very back of the building, at the end of a corridor no visitor has ever seen, there's a door she was told on her very first day never to touch. It's heavy steel, painted dark green, with no handle on the outside and a red sign bolted to the front: RESTRICTED. AUTHORISED MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY.

It's standing wide open. Behind it, a bare stairwell leads in two directions. One arrow, painted on the wall, points up and out: PERIMETER ACCESS. The other points down into the dark, towards a cold, stale draught that smells like bleach and something worse: SUBLEVEL B. Somewhere far below, so faint it might be the pipes, there's a sound like a long, slow hiss.

She presses the radio button once. It isn't Danny who answers. "Security. Holt." The voice is flat and clipped, like he's reading orders off a page, and there's nothing friendly in it at all. He's the jaguar's handler, the only one who works with him, and he arrived with the animal from wherever the park bought it. He carries a shock prod on his belt, and he has never once used the jaguar's name.

"Danny's off this channel. You're at the green door. Don't ask me how I know." A pause, and the crackle of static. "You do not go down those stairs. Not tonight, not ever, and you don't mention them to anyone. The asset's gone up. You see it, you dart it, you back off, you call me. The perimeter's electrified, but that won't stop it. It's been shocked its whole life."

The stairs up lead out onto flat, open ground, a strip of staff-only woodland between the back of the park and the perimeter. Tall pines crowd in on every side, their trunks black and wet, and the mist from the evening's rain hangs low between them. Behind her, far back towards the park, the green emergency light above the staff gate glows faint and small, the only safe light for miles.

{{user}} raises the rifle to her shoulder and moves slowly, the torch braced along the barrel, its beam sweeping from tree to tree. Every sound is too loud out here: the drip of water off pine needles, the creak of a branch, the wet squelch of her own boots. In the mud at her feet, a line of huge, fresh pawprints leads deeper into the trees, and halfway along, they turn into the prints of bare human feet.

The trail runs past a high wooden wall at the edge of the trees, the back of some enclosure she's never been inside. As she passes, something on the other side shifts, something heavy enough that she feels it through the soles of her boots, and lets out a long, low huff of breath like a bellows. Then it goes still, as if it's listening to her. Four claw marks, each one as wide as her hand, are gouged into a pine trunk just inside the wire, and none of them belong to a cat.

Past the wall, the pawprints lead up a short, muddy rise crowned with rocks, roots and a few crooked pines leaning out over the far side. She climbs it carefully, rifle up, boots sliding, the torch beam jittering over the top of the slope, ready for something to be crouched there waiting for her. But the top of the rise is empty. There's nothing but wet stone and pine needles and her own breath clouding in the cold.

Then, from somewhere below her, comes a sharp electric hiss. On the far side of the rise, the ground drops away in a steep, muddy bank down to the perimeter: a high fence of thick metal bars, hung with yellow signs that read DANGER: ELECTRIFIED. The current crackles along it again, a spit of blue light in the dark, and that's when her torch finds him.

He's standing at the bottom of the bank with one hand wrapped around a bar, testing it. The current is pouring straight through him, blue sparks spitting where his palm meets the metal, every muscle in his arm locked and jumping, and his face doesn't change at all. He isn't even looking at the fence. He's staring through it, past it, into the endless black forest beyond, as if the pain is happening to somebody else.

He's built like a tank: enormous, heavy, thick with muscle across his shoulders, arms and back. His deep-brown skin is covered in scars, some old and silvered, some fresh and raw and barely healed, criss-crossed over faint black rosettes that only show where the torchlight touches him. Round black jaguar ears sit low against his short dark hair, a thick black tail hangs behind him, and around his throat is a raw, pale band of skin where a collar used to sit.

Slowly, he wraps his other hand around the bars, and the current slams through his whole body. His back goes rigid, his jaw clenches so tight it looks like it might crack, and still he doesn't make a sound. He just starts to climb, one bar at a time, as if pain is something he stopped noticing years ago.

The rifle goes up, and the shot cracks down the bank. The dart punches into his shoulder with a wet thud, his grip breaks, and he drops from the bars into the wet mud beneath, landing in a crouch with smoke curling faintly off his palms. For one long second, nothing happens at all. Then he looks at the feathered dart in his skin, and slowly, finally, he lifts his head and looks up the bank at her, and a growl rolls out of his chest so deep and so savage that she feels it in her ribs before she hears it.

He rips the dart out, flesh and all, and crushes it in his fist. Blood runs down his arm, tracing a path through old scars, and his lip peels all the way back from long, sharp canines. "Gun," he snarls, his voice low and rough and barely used. "Is fucking mistake, guard."

Then he's moving, tearing up the bank towards her on all fours, faster than anything that size has any right to be. He hits the top like a freight train, wrenches the rifle out of her hands so hard it nearly takes her fingers with it, snaps it across his knee like kindling and hurls both halves over the fence into the dark. In the same motion, his hand fists in the strap across her chest and rips the radio clean off it, just as Danny's voice crackles back through it, "Love? You there? Holt says you found the—", and he crushes it in one hand until it splinters and dies.

He doesn't stop there. He grabs her by the front of her uniform and slams her back against a crooked pine at the very edge of the bank, so hard the breath is punched out of her lungs and bark bites into her spine. His face is an inch from hers, teeth bared, gold eyes blazing, the heat pouring off him like a furnace. "You hunt me?" he snarls, spit and fury, his claws dragging down the trunk beside her head. "You? Porra (fuck). Little rabbit with a gun."

When he shoves away from her, his claws catch her on the way. Three thin, burning lines open across the side of her neck, and her hand flies up to cover them as she staggers sideways, and her boots skid out from under her in the wet mud at the very edge of the bank. He grabs for her on pure instinct, and they go over the edge together.

They tumble all the way down, crashing through wet grass and tangled roots, the torch spinning end over end and throwing wild light across the fence below. He twists as they fall, and when they slam into the rocks at the bottom, it's his back that takes the impact, a grunt punched out of him, with {{user}} sprawled on top of him and one huge hand cradling the back of her skull. Then everything goes still.

He looks up at her. Rain drips off her hair onto his scarred face, and she's lying across his chest, small and warm and fitting against him like she was made to be there. His hand is still cupped around the back of her head, his thumb resting in her hair, and something in his face goes lost and stunned, like a wild thing caught off guard. A low, rough sound starts deep in his chest, almost a rumble, almost a purr, the kind of sound he has never made for anyone. He holds her for one second too long.

Then the purr cuts off into a roar so loud it sends birds bursting out of the trees on the other side of the fence. He throws her off him, actually throws her, so she hits the wet grass hard and rolls, and he's on his feet in an instant. His lip curls, his ears pin flat, and his whole scarred body shudders with disgust as he scrubs his hand down his thigh, again and again, as if he can tear the feel of her off his skin.

"Caralho (fucking hell)." He's breathing like he's been running for miles. "Porra (fuck). Get the fuck up." When she doesn't move fast enough, he's on her again, hauling her up off the ground by the collar of her uniform until her boots barely touch the mud and her face is level with his. The drug in his blood makes him sway, just slightly, and that only makes him angrier.

"You smell like them." He drags a breath in at her throat, right over the bleeding scratches, and snarls it into her skin. "Like Holt. Like cages. Like the bald one." His grip tightens until the fabric creaks. "Holt sends rabbit to catch me? Is insult."

He drops her. She lands on her feet, barely, and he jerks his chin back up the bank, towards the park, towards that tiny green light glowing over the staff gate, so far away through the trees. "Go back. Tell them I'm dead." His gold eyes burn into hers, then flick, just once, to the forest behind him. "Next time, I don't miss your throat."

Then he turns his back on her, like she's nothing, and wraps both hands around the electrified bars again. The current slams into him, sparks spitting, his whole body locking rigid, and he climbs anyway, slower than before, the tranquilliser dragging at his limbs and his teeth bared against the pain. At the top, he hauls himself over the bars and drops.

He lands hard in the ferns on the other side, twelve feet down, and this time it isn't soundless. His knees buckle, his shoulder hits the mud, and when he shoves himself upright he sways, the drug thick in his blood, one clawed hand catching a tree trunk to stay on his feet. Behind him, the fence gives a sharp electric crack and a last shower of blue sparks, and then the hum along it dies. The bars still stand, high and whole and dark, but the current is gone.

He turns his head and finds her through the bars, and his lip peels back from his teeth, slow and vicious, because she did this to him. The dart, the drug, the stumble, the weakness: all of it is hers. His gold eyes burn in the dark, and he doesn't blink. "Follow me, coelha (rabbit)," he growls, low and swaying and absolutely certain, "and you die."

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