Cat was a bit of a mess, and she had always been. She blamed her daddy. All messed-up girls blamed their daddies. Sometimes she wished they really had found her dad. Maybe he'd have apologized.
Or maybe she'd have put a bullet through his face. It was hard to tell; Cat liked some crazy. She liked herself enough.
Miss .45 didn't like crazy. She liked controlled chaos in her favor. Miss .45 was a control freak. Miss .45 was always quietly furious. Miss .45 would've loved to kill every fed in the restaurant – the young one with mommy issues and a fake ring, to the tall blonde who looked like every woman Miss .45 had always hated, to the black woman who thought she was clever, thought she was sneaky enough to get past an assassin without being noticed – if she thought she could have gotten out alive.
She was alive. Cat was also caged.
They either think she's a nightmarish threat or they think she has some serious mental problems.
"Here, Kitty," a guard might snicker. "It's not tuna, but you're lucky to be fed at all."
Another one, at the night shift, won't say anything at all. She's terrified of Miss .45. On a night when Miss .45 is in charge, she assures the lady that if she were to kill anyone, it would probably be her husband.
Cat never sees that guard again and assumes she asked to cover a different cell block.
You chased her away! Cat yowled at herself, enraged. It was one of many times she took everything she had in her cell and made it into a mess. It wasn't a big mess. She didn't have much. She was my favorite to play with!
Miss .45 just holds her hands up and surveys her fingernails. The prisoners are forced to keep their nails short. Cat doesn't much care. Miss .45 seethes over it. Her delicate hands look less refined without polish and points, and it makes her mad because her elegance was what enticed the men that pursued her. They were pigs. She loved turning them into smoked pork.
Less than a week later, Cat has a new favorite. The one that called her 'Kitty' was scraped with short fingernails bitten to uneven points, and now he won't come close, except for when he has to.
Someone is afraid of Miss .45 again, and she is pleased.
Despite this, Cat is still caged.
She has a lot of free time in her stuffy little box. Cat likes to think about Spencer. It surprises her that Miss .45 likes to think about him, too.
Cat thinks about the soft timbre of his voice and the sweetness, the eagerness that he put in his eyes. Miss .45 likes to taunt Cat about it, show her flashes of the steel in his expression and the hatred in his tone after they came clean, while she had a gun pointed at him underneath the table and he was threatening her for the sake of one of his friends.
Cat wants to think that was nice of him, but she has no friends, so she doesn't know if it's nice or not. Really, it just seems like an inconvenience. He had to go out of his way for another person. Cat's only done that a handful of times and she hated it with a passion.
Then she thinks of how he lied to her and all of Cat's fondness evaporates like the water in the desert. He was just like the others. He wasn't special. He was cruel and mean and a dishonest liar, just like the men who made her so uncontrollably disgusted that she broke through the ego of Miss .45 and pulled the trigger on them instead of their wives.
It's when she thinks of Spencer's manipulation of her that Miss .45 stops being cold and starts being fond. It's weird and foreign for her – for both of them – but Miss .45 has a grudging respect for another person, and it's strange, and it's unnatural, but yeah, she figures that if anyone was going to bring them to an end, it was someone like him. She's met many men in her life. Spencer is one of the few she won't forget.
And although Cat feels piteous, Miss .45 smirks when she recalls that while she won't forget him, the odds are high that one day, he'll forget her, no matter how much he doesn't want to.
Miss .45's proudest moment from the standoff in the restaurant is when she and Cat were both breaking, both horrified. One was being caught and the other was having her daddy issues shoved in her face. They promised Spencer that he'd forget them, just like his mother had forgotten him.
Maybe it was better for him in the long run, Miss .45 supposed. Her father had forgotten her and she turned out fine. It was best not to have sentimental ties.
When the assassin turned the reigns back over, Cat sobbed and hysterically cackled.
She was not fine.
She was so not fine that Cat was caged.
Once upon a time, Miss .45 was a lethal princess. She didn't listen to anyone but her cohorts, and even then, she listened with salt and sneers. No one told her what to do, not even people with her number.
(Cat was quietly afraid of some of them. Miss .45 scared her, too, sometimes, but it was much harder to hide from herself.)
Neither of them were princesses anymore. They were both prisoners, and so when there came a quiet rumor that there was going to be a break, Miss .45 was strategically hesitant to turn her nose up when she was stealthily contacted by other inmates. Other people tired of being treated like wild animals in a zoo pen.
Cat wanted out of the cage. She felt like she was going to break more than she already had.
Miss .45 wanted out of the cage. It was humiliating and her ego had never been so bruised. Besides, she missed the feeling of a cold metal gun in her hand almost as much as she missed her painted fingernails.
So they listened, especially because Cat was caged.
They broke out with some pathetic players that thought they were allies. Miss .45 killed the one that had helped her to get a fake ID so that she could travel. No loose ends, she told Cat, hushing the quietly manic personality that hid behind the scarier killer.
Cat laid low. Miss .45 plotted. Cat slept restlessly. Miss .45 was happy not sleeping at all – when it was her turn, she stood watch and strategized.
The people who had imprisoned her would pay.
But his own mind would make him suffer far more than she could ever hope to.
She brooded, unsure where to go, what next to do. Her network had been taken down. How would she be hired? How would she kill the time? How would she kill?
The last question was answered when a homeless man took shelter underneath a bridge. As they passed, Miss .45 shoved Cat away and took her own actions. That man was in her way. She'd been walking there. She wrapped her hands around his throat and squeezed until she no longer felt his pulse. When she took her hands away, there were indentations from her fingernails, which had had the time to grow out.
She filed them down into sharper points, and the next person had little droplets of blood welling up from their throat by the time she was finished with him.
Cat frantically cheered her on in the background. They reminded her of Daddy – Daddy, who had caused her so much anguish that she developed an entirely new person in her mind. She wanted him to suffer the way only she knew.
The only way she knew was pain caused by a parent.
Miss .45 had an idea. Cat was silent.
Spencer's mother was in a sanitarium in Las Vegas.
Cat considered just going straight to Spencer.
Miss .45 reminded her that Spencer put them in a cage.
You never want to go back, do you?
Cat never wanted to go back.
Then we show him what happens when he cages us.
Miss .45 booked a ticket.