Page 118 of Even Robots Die
I return to my room and find Florentine still sleeping, but I don’t wake her up.
Silently, I turn the chair near the low table to face the bed and I watch her sleep.
She needs the rest. She might hate me come morning because I wasted precious time to get her father out of the cell that he’s probably rotting in now, but this is more important.
He can deal with a few rough nights. She’s barely been sleeping lately. She needs those few extra hours of sleep.
I’m ready for her ire if it means she’s healthier.
66
Florentine
When I wake up, the night is fully over and I can see the sky through the colored window of Brice’s room.
I slept so well in the smell of him that I’m glad I don’t remember anything I dreamed, especially since he’s looking at me from the chair now facing the bed.
“Did you sleep?” I ask him with a yawn as I stretch my arms above my head.
Brice shakes his head, but his eyes zero in on the sliver of skin that appears at my middle when I raise my arms to stretch.
“A messenger came,” he says, and suddenly I’m sitting ramrod straight in his bed as the blanket—did he cover me last night?—finishes pooling around my hips.
I don’t like the seriousness of his tone, especially since there was a messenger, but he hasn’t said anything about Dad returning. He knows it would be the first thing I would want to know if he was here.
“The foxes are in league with the birds, and the birds now have your father.”
“What do they want?” I ask.
“You,” Brice says with a sigh. “They heard about your weapons, and probably also the fact that you’ve been seen with a bat recently; they gave us three days to trade you for him.”
“Talk about déjà vu,” I mutter under my breath.
I stand from the bed and move to the door, but Brice blocks it with his hand.
“Don’t trade your life for his,” he says, and I don’t know if it’s because I want him to care, but he sounds pleading. “They’re not me. They’re not going to let him go if you go to them.”
“Like you care,” I tell him, with my back facing him.
I can feel his breath on the back of my neck, but I’m not moving, stuck between him and the door.
Brice grabs my arm and turns me so I’m facing him and he’s crowding me against the door, his right arm above my head.
“Of course I care,” he tells me, outraged.
“Oh yeah,” I tell him with all the sass I can muster, considering I just woke up. “You care about your investment. If I’m gone, who is going to reset your brain? You don’t care about me. You’re like everyone else. You just care about what I can do for you, so let me deal with this and stay out of my way.”
I know I’m being unfair—he showed that he cared even if it’s not in the way I want—and that I’m just distancing myself from him the best I know.
If I don’t care about him, it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t either, right?
“Of course you care,” I continue. “You care about my blood. That seemed so good that you had a freaking hard on for almost an hour after that, but didn’t care about what it triggered for me. I’m just a blood bag or a mistake to you. You don’t care that I’ve dreamed about that kiss for weeks now and that all it was for you was bloodlust. You’re exactly what I thought you were when you made me work for you. An asshole.”
I feel a tear glide down my cheek, but I don’t make a move to dry it. Instead, I hit his chest with my fists.
“Are you done, Miss Furious?” he asks me when I finally stop hitting.
My breathing is hard, and my vision is blurry. I guess more tears spilled out after that first one.
