The lion stared with his brilliant eyes at the zookeeper in front of him, as she brought a man, gagged and tied, into his cage. He growled unappreciatively. He didn’t like strangers in his cage. He wanted to know what was going on.

“Here he is, Connor,” Maria, one of the zookeepers at the zoo, said in her soft, crooning voice. “Here is your dinner for tonight. An extra special treat. A human. I bet you’ll love ripping off his flesh, gnawing at his bones and just savouring every last inch of him after all these years of being fed chicken meat, won’t you, you little brute?” Connor bared his teeth menacingly. Maria wasn’t his normal zookeeper. No, Trista would have never done something like this. Although the thought of some fresh kill seemed almost too appealing to resist...

“Yeah... you like that don’t you, you savage beast?” Maria smiled, looking at Connor drooling at the sight of potential food. “All it takes is one mighty bite, and you’ll rip a limb off this pathetic man. You like that thought, don’t you?” Maria, being a zookeeper, knew just how to make her voice soothing for an animal, but Connor felt that it still retained a hint of slyness, a slyness that was absent in Trista’s soft, kind croon. He wished his regular zookeeper were here.

“And,” she continued, almost like an afterthought, “I’ll just say that Trista left the gates open, Robert here was wandering in the zoo after hours and you just ripped him right up. That way, my man gets killed, and you and your silly little mistress will get in deep, deep trouble.” And then she approached closer. “And kind, innocent Maria isn’t suspected of a thing.” Dangerously close. “Just make sure you don’t make too much of a mess. Blood makes me faint.” And she laughed. A high-pitched, cruel laugh that Connor didn’t like.

Presently he stared at the man in front of him. He looked terrified. Connor had seen him a few times (outside his enclosure of course) and he’d always seemed to be a good chap. Connor wondered why Maria wanted him killed. Robert probably found out about those pill-like spheres that Maria would give people in exchange for those rectangular slips of paper that seemed so important to humans. But the man looked terrified. Tears fell out of his eyes. However, just then, Connor forgot all sanity, all sympathy, all of his bred-in-captivity civilisation... the meat was too tantalisingly close...

He steeped forward, on his soft, velvety paws, without making a sound. His eyes gleamed with bloodlust. His teeth were bared, and he stuck his rough tongue out, drooling all the while. Maria smirked coldly. Connor was getting closer, closer, almost there...

With a mighty roar he turned and grabbed his prey. There was only one bloodcurdling scream, and then silence, as for five minutes, he feasted on his prey. Then, blood dripping off his whiskers and his mane, he stepped forward to the other person in the cage.

He slowly gnawed at Robert’s bounds. The man, still looking very terrified, pulled the gag out of his mouth. Connor growled once again to let him know that if he didn’t leave soon, he’d be next.

The man, in a mixture of fear and gratitude, smiled wanly at the lion. Then, he slipped the key out of the pocket of the overalls that Maria’s corpse was clad in, and slipped it into her hand. Ah, so the human wasn’t so naive after all, Connor thought to himself, as the man opened the gate to the enclosure and fled. Connor sat down regally. He could finish most of this meat by the time the first zookeepers came in to check on him, but he thought he’d take his time. He had plenty of it.

And the lion stared with his brilliant eyes at the zookeeper in front of him, as she lay there, mutilated and bloody, and he continued his feast. A feast fit for a king.