Page 8 of Lost and Bound
If I hadn’t already felt chilled down to my bones, that would’ve done the trick.
But it also made my mind start turning, trying to work everything I’d learned over the past twenty-four hours into some kind of coherent whole, adding it to what I already knew and guessed.
My first probably-a-year in this place, I’d been dragged out of my cell frequently, if not exactly regularly, subjected to a variety of horrors. Jonathan Hawthorne had been there most of the time.
I closed my eyes, forcing down a wave of nausea. Hawthorne. That motherfucker. My former lover’s father, and the architect of every fucking thing that’d gone wrong in my life.
Well, no. I’d made a lot of bad choices, no matter how much I wished I could blame Hawthorne. But some of those choices had been influenced by magic. He’d all but admitted, once when he had me laid out drugged and helpless and surrounded by bits of foul-smelling herbs and candles, that he’d done something to my mind, nudged me into thinking of him as an ally. Someone who could help me get what I thought of as rightfully mine: leadership of my family’s pack.
No one could possibly have been more unsuitable as the leader of the Armitage pack than me, but that revelation had come slowly, painfully, and miserably over the course of the first year spent alternately alone in my cell, battering at the walls or lying in a ball of pain and despair, or subjected to Hawthorne and company’s not-so-tender mercies.
And my willingness to work with someone like Hawthorne really underlined that. I’d spied on Nate Hawthorne for his father, and more than that, worse than that, I’d slept with him to keep him focused on me, rather than making other friends, other connections. I hadn’t exactly spied on my pack for Hawthorne, because they were my family and I hadsomefucking morals, but I’d definitely let slip a lot more than I should have when Hawthorne plied me with expensive bourbon and nodded sympathetically, listening to my mostly imaginary woes.
And then, Hawthorne had faked his own death. I’d known it was bullshit. He’d kept in contact with me, laying a piece of strong magic on me to keep my mouth shut.
A little less than a year later, he’d summoned me to a meeting, furious that I’d let his son break up with me. I got out of my car and walked to the meeting point, and then it was lights out. I’d woken up in my cell, and I’d been here ever since.
But I hadn’t seen Hawthorne here for a long time. Maybe even as much as a year. Had he finally gotten himself killed for real? I hoped it’d been agonizing. But with a fucker like that, you couldn’t count on it. He could just be busy. Working on some other horrifying, nightmarish project in some other godforsaken place.
Anyway, he had a couple of colleagues who’d taken up the slack.
For a while, at least. My trips to the lab had slowed, with much longer gaps in between, and then finally stopped.
And it had been weeks since the last. Thinking harder, I was inclined to believe it had been more like a month.
All right. That had been my situation before yesterday.
What did I know now, that I hadn’t before?
Well, I knew my captors didn’t have any further use for me. I knew they’d tossed me in here expecting my cellmate to kill me. I knew they were so confident in that expectation that they weren’t bothering to feed me.
I didn’t know, but I could guess, that my cellmate’s tolerance for sharing what little food they gave him would run out sooner rather than later, and he’d finish me off.
And the guards hadn’t bothered to look to see if I was dead…
There was something there, I just hadn’t quite managed to figure it out yet.
I got up, wobbly and lightheaded but feeling like I wouldn’t die quite yet. My werewolf physiology had been busy while I slept, replenishing my body’s blood supply in double-time.
I drank, I pissed, I washed my face, and I wished they’d let me bring my worn-out toothbrush from my cell. I eyed the equally decrepit toothbrush lying on the back of the sink. Did I dare use my cellmate’s, and did I want to?
A glance over my shoulder showed him sitting quietly, completely still. Only the faintest gleam from under his lashes let me know he wasn’t asleep, but watching me. I reached for the toothbrush, and then jerked my hand back.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I didn’t wait to be told twice. No toothpaste, of course, but scrubbing my teeth with water was better than nothing. Had he brushed his teeth after he drank half of my blood?
Another handful of water chased down the nausea that thought brought up, and then I had nothing to do but sit down again. I hesitated. Would he allow me to share his pallet, now that I’d gotten up? Apparently so, because when I dropped down next to him again, this time leaving a few inches between us, he didn’t react at all.
DidIwant to be sharing the pallet withhim, was a better question. No, but the bare concrete didn’t leave me a lot of palatable options.
We sat in silence for a while, as I stared at the wall. His bulk beside me grew more menacing rather than less as time went on and the faint light through the window slits began to fade into gray nothingness. I was conscious of his every breath, of the heat of him, of his bare chest, of the sizable bulge in his thin pants. Of his hand resting on the pallet a couple of inches from mine. Of the aura of coiled power emanating from him, almost palpable.
I looked around a little, trying to distract myself from his presence.
My eye caught on something tucked under the edge of the pallet on his other side—some kind of plastic?
“What’s that?” My voice echoed in the stillness. I hadn’t heard anything from the hallway since I woke up, either, I realized. Not even the footsteps of a passing guard. “Under the mattress.”
