The handcuffs clamped painfully around his wrists and Negan winced, sucking air through clenched teeth and making a hissing sound.

"Move!" The woman, now behind him, instructed harshly as she shoved him hard in the back, guiding him towards the open door.

"You do know this doesn't end well for you, right?" he said over his shoulder while stumbling forward and almost hitting his head on the doorframe in the process, "you, Rick, your merry little band in Alexandria… my people will come down hard…"

His words were cut short by the woman's malignant giggle.

She grabbed his left forearm hard, halting him just before the exit.

"Your people?" The woman scoffed, "don't care about you no more, Negan! How in the hell do you think I got in here? Most of them left you for a better life at the Hilltop and Alexandria, and the ones that didn't, I took care off."

She was lying - she had to be.

It was all a bluff.

He wanted to call it, but in that same instant he opened his mouth to speak, he felt the tip of her katana between his shoulder blades, resting against a vertebrae and was instead distracted by the image of a blade cutting through his skin, tendons and flesh as easily as a knife through soft butter.

The woman did not have to speak to get her point across; the message was unmistakable.

I'm the one doing the talking, not you.

He decided to keep quiet, at least for the time being. There was something about the woman's demeanour that told him she meant business and wouldn't hesitate to kill him if she had to.

But why was she keeping him alive to begin with?

Perhaps her people wanted a public execution.

That would be so like holier-than-thou, nauseating politically correct Rick. Probably by good, old-fashioned hanging too, the kind that made Rick feel like the sheriff in a western, the one who kills the bad guy and saves the day.

Negan knew his types of men very well, and Rick the Prick was the kind of asshole who would grow stiff just thinking about that sort of thing, being the hero and all that shit….

His thoughts were interrupted by the woman's mouth against his ear, her voice was a soft purr.

"Yeah that is right, you bastard. They have denounced you and left you behind like the sad piece of murderous shit that you are."

There was a short pause before she continued.

"You're making empty threats. You don't have the power to command anyone any longer - the sooner you realize that, the less humiliating your downfall is gonna be."

With that, she once again shoved him hard in the back, herding him forward into the hallway.

The stepped into the long and dimly lit corridor that led from the bathroom at one end to six other rooms in Negan's private section of the Sanctuary.

From a distance Negan could make out something or someone laying across the hallway around halfway towards the end of it.

As they neared the form, he saw that it was in fact the headless body of a woman - one of his soldiers most likely.

The samurai had made at least one kill. She hadn't lied about that part.

At least there was someone with balls big enough to do their fucking job.

He scanned the corpse from the neck wound down to her boots, curious to know who she was.

When his eyes reached the woman's hip, he noticed her .44 was still holstered which meant that her job of defending him had been less great than he initially thought.

As he stepped over the body, careful not to put his bare feet down in the pool of blood surrounding it, Negan recognized the motive on the back of the woman's shirt.

It was from the Bannaroo music and arts festival 2005.

He knew of only one person who wore a shirt like that.

Ain't that a bitch.

"I see you killed Arat. Too bad. She was one of my best people."

He turned and looked directly at his captor, giving her a smile that wasn't really a smile at all.

"Did you cut her down from behind? Just asking…for a friend."

"She never knew what hit her…" the woman responded quietly with no small amount of cynicism in her voice.

Her eyes were like dark, shimmering pits that drilled their way into Negan's. It made him a little nervous and for a moment he actually felt like looking away, but stopped himself and instead held her gaze, uncomfortable as it was.

No fuckin' way he was going to show any kind of weakness.

Weakness is what got you killed in this world.

It was almost as deadly as kindness.

"…which was more than she deserved – more than any of you people deserve."

With an expression of disgust on her face, the samurai looked down his naked body and seemed to halt around his midsection.

Her expression morphed into one of amusement and she made a snorting sound.

Was this woman staring at his dick?

"The only reason you're still breathing, is because we need you to be – at least for a little while. You keep talking even though I told you not to. Be mouthy again and I won't think twice about removing that tiny part of you. You don't really need it to be useful to us."

She pointed the sword at his groin-area, but kept it at a somewhat safe distance.

"Tell me you understand, Negan."

"Come on girl…you wouldn't do that…"

"Try me."

The katana moved closer and closer, the tip pointed directly at the base of his cock.

"I understand." He stated quickly and watched with relief as the woman after a few seconds of looking like she had been cheated out of something good, drew her sword backwards.

He tried to swallow discretely, but his treacherous dry throat made a clicking sound and he hated it.

The woman made a gesture with her free hand.

Turn around.

Slowly, carefully, Negan turned his back to her, his face burning red hot.

With her dick-threat she had shut him up, made him feel like a weak piece of shit, and for that he promised himself that if he survived this cluster-fuck of a situation he found himself in, this woman was going to be the first of her kind to meet Lucille.

He didn't enjoy killing women, but this one…well, this one had it coming big time.

They both remained silent as they made their way down the hallway. At the very end of it, they came to a halt at a massive mahogany door.

When it became clear to Negan that this was their stop and that the woman was not in fact lost, a small and rare sense of alarm rushed through him.

This was the door leading to his master bedroom; a room with no other exits than the one they now stood in front of.

It was a dead end.

They weren't fleeing the Sanctuary, a very strange and seemingly unwise decision on the woman's part given that she had just broken into unknown territory filled with enemies armed to the teeth and kidnapped their hauncho.

If it were Negan in her sneakers, he would have wanted to get out - and fast - but the woman was deliberately backing herself into a corner…why was that?

Perhaps she wasn't lying after all.

He looked over his shoulder at the samurai still pointing her sword at his back.

The place was awfully quiet.

Perhaps the disloyal fuckers really had revolted and left him behind, Arat being one of the only true soldiers left (if not the only one.)

Perhaps they were all dead, chopped up by Rick and his dick-less crew of peasants with their pitchforks and machetes.

Or maybe, just maybe…Rick had somehow convinced his people to give him up, promising them a share in Alexandria's abundance in return for Negan's head on a platter.

He could guess away the reasons for his current circumstances all the live long day and still not come any closer to the truth. There were too many possible causes – all highly unlikely, yes, but never the less possible.

Negan had lived too long to know not to rule anything out.

"Open it."

He could see the woman's lips curl up into a sneer, and once again he felt the cold steel touch his skin.

"I can't!" He wriggled his hands in the cuffs "Hello!"

"Use your fucking mouth!"

Negan turned his gaze back towards the door, took in a deep breath of the hallway's air that now reeked of his former lieutenant's blood, and did as commanded.