Page 15 of Three Bites

Huh. There should not be any bloodied items there, I had a separate pile for those that needed hand washing… But as I searched among the materials I indeed found a bloodied white shirt. How did I miss it? And more importantly, how did Matthias know it was there when it was under other clothing items? Did he… smell the blood?

“Thanks for the offer but I will do this myself,” I insisted. “I don’t need to give Jonas and Carl more ideas to screw me over. I’m sure they would use it against me, if they saw you taking care of my work.”

“If you’re sure,” Matthias said with obvious reluctance.

He planted himself on a chair near the entrance and at first he kept an alert posture, as if he was at an army observation post with enemies about to attack, but over time he lost his rigidness and his foot started tapping against the floor. A few minutes later he jumped from his seat and landed in a crouch before he started doing squats, then katas from some kind of martial arts.

He had to be bored out of his mind.

“You have your phone on you?” I asked after he sat back in his chair an hour later.

I was angling for some music but I got something even better.

“Yup. Hey, maybe I could read to you!” the brute of a man said, making me feel a bit bad for judging the book by the cover and assuming he wouldn’t be someone filling his free time with reading.

“Alright. That sounds fun,” I agreed eagerly. “What do you have there?”

“I’m in the middle of this long saga but I had been planning to read this one collection of short stories… let me find it… here it is! Hope you like dragons.”

We shared a smile.

“I love dragons. Bring it on!”

Chapter Nine

After a whole day of hard work, I was usually completely out of energy but the delicious late lunch revitalized me enough for me to not go straight to my bed for a power nap. Hmm, what could I do with that energy? Games or movies weren’t an option because my room was kept utilitarian and I was forbidden access to phones or anything with an internet connection. I was permitted only a supervised call to my brother once a week; a measure for the sake of keeping both of us in line and certainly not for my comfort. I was still musing about what to do with the rest of my day when we reached my room.

My eyes widened after I opened the door.

The counter of my tiny kitchen was full of various products. Stacks of cans and other non-perishable goods lined all the surfaces.

“I would prefer fresh produce but your fridge is too small for that so I had to compromise and get all this stuff,” Matthias waved at the canned beans, tomatoes, pineapples, peaches… youcould make a proper dinner plus a fruit salad from what I was seeing.

My steps led me to the fridge and, as I suspected, it was filled to the brim. Meat, some of the vegetables and fruit you couldn’t find in a canned form, eggs, milk, cottage cheese… Somehow, the nail in the coffin for me was when I spotted the mint and parsley plants on the windowsill.

“This,thiswas your important mission?” I said and my voice cracked. “Getting food for me?”

“Well, getting food forusif it makes it better,” Matthias raised a brow. “I’m going to prepare enough to last for the next few days so we won’t have the lunch problem again. I will just carry two lunchboxes with us, problem solved.”

He pointed at the two brightly colored plastic lunch containers. One sported little frogs while the other one was peppered with glittery stars.

“This one’s mine,” I tapped the froggy one instead of the girly stars, looking at Matthias challengingly.

“Good!” he replied with unexpected smugness. “I hate frogs.”

“Then why did you buy that design?”

“I sent Theo to pick the lunch boxes out while I chose the produce. The little bastard chose the frogs to piss me off. He said it was his payment for making him an errand boy.”

“Ah, so he didn’t want to help with shopping for me…” I bit my lip.

“No! No. He just likes to take every opportunity he can to annoy me. And, ah, to be honest…” Matthias rubbed the back of his neck. “I think he did it to distract himself. He has certain issues when it comes to… how the learned folks say it…food insecurity, that’s the phrase. When he learned how you are treated here…”

I winced internally. The poor state of my fridge could be taken as me being just before my grocery run, so Theo didn’t haveany reason to suspect anything when he prepared breakfast for us that first day. My food rations consisted of only the cheapest ingredients or things the other servants planned to throw away, and I sometimes had to deal with only one meal to get me through the day. The luxury of coffee cost me working for twelve hours a day for a week. Taking other servants’ shifts was one of the only currencies available to me, as my whole salary was being taken to pay my brother’s debt.

“Did Theo… have to go hungry?” I asked quietly.

Matthias ran his hand through his hair, turning it into an irredeemable mess.

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