Page 45 of Night of the Witch
I didn’t give in, though. This isn’t wild magic. Itisn’t.
The kapitän twists toward me, but I’m not quick enough. He knocks the satchel out of my upraised hand, and when I spin to smash the other one into his face, he ducks, grabs my wrist, and flips me around so my back plants against his firm chest. The last satchel falls from my hand, and he kicks it down into the lower level.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” His growl vibrates down my spine.
“You can’t with the spell I cast,” I say, breathless, “but that doesn’t stopmefrom hurtingyou.”
I slam my heel down on the top of his foot. He wavers, and I shove out of his arms, but where can I go? Back down to the inescapable cellar? Maybe if I climb purposefully out the window, my spell will let me pass—
The kapitän tackles me to the floor.
Panic sends cold sweat across my skin as I drop, the breath huffing out of me, but through it, I can feel my heart hammering on the wood, the floorboards indenting into my stomach, and the weight of the kapitän on my back, the full hard breadth of his body against mine—it’s too much, tooreal, too far past the point of no return.
I can’t help it—I scream.
The kapitän lifts up off of me, just a breath of space, and it makes me realize hedidn’tland his full weight on me. I’m struck again by how huge he is compared to me, how immovable, and how fragile I am at his mercy.
My scream pitches, catching in my throat, tripping on my own hesitation—if heisso much stronger than me, why hasn’t he hurt me yet?
“Schiesse,” he hisses, mostly to himself, and he moves only to press my arms over my head. I scream again and writhe, trying to buck him off,something, fightback—
He reaches up to my wrists.
And unlocks my manacles.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says again, punctuating each word.
He moves away from me, taking the manacles with him.
I scramble off the floor, putting my back to the corner, breath hoarse in my lungs. My wrists burn at the freedom, the cold air hitting the raw skin like knives.
He’s standing between me and the door, which he leaves open, maybe realizing how dark it is in here, how abyss-like. But even the pale glow of the clouded sun outside does little to shed light on us, casting him in oblong gray shadows.
“Prove it,” I snap. “Let me go.”
“I can’t do that.”
I laugh. It’s cold and brittle.
“I can’t do that,” he repeats with force, “because every hexenjäger in the city is looking for you. And I need you to tell me—exactly—where you sent my sister. Also”—he pauses, and I see his tongue run across his lips, a self-deprecating look of exhaustion that ages him in the low light— “I need your help.”
I go slack against the wall. “What could you possibly need with awitch?”
He frowns at me. “I told you. I’m going to save everyone.”
What he said to me in the cellar. That wasn’t a hallucination?
None of that was.
This hexenjäger…
…wants to set all the prisonersfree.
I don’t move. Not to fight back. Not to run. Not to protest.
The kapitän takes that as tentative agreement, and he reaches into a bag at his waist, pulls out a lantern.
When he lights it, his hand goes to the door. My whole body stiffens as he closes it, too aware of how alone we are, of how no one still knows that this hexenjäger has me.
