"Yeah, I like that plan better." I fished in my pocket, comforted slightly by the sloshing inside. "Here."
He wordlessly turned right again, and I followed into a much narrower space as the hallway. The walls bounced back our sounds much faster than they had.
"Wait," he snapped and shut the door.
"No,youwait." I lunged toward the door just as a lock outside slid home. My breaths stalled. "Hey!" I banged on the wood with both my fist and my stick.
Silence.
Goddamn it, Aika. I supposed I'd really pissed him off.
This was not good. Of course, I couldn't have predicted that coming to Old Man’s Den would end with me locked inside a room. A closet more like, I realized as I turned around. My stick hit the leg of a table, and beyond it a simple wooden chair. I sat there to rest for a bit, my exhausted body feeling like it was going to revolt any second against me and shut down. My ribs hurt something awful, and even my healing wolf bites protested that I’d pushed myself too far.
Time ticked by. I could feel it in my empty stomach, growing emptier by the second. My body did shut down for a while, and I dozed. When I woke again, my brain felt foggy and everything ached. How long had I been out?
"Hey!" I tried to shout, but my throat had dried so I couldn’t push out anything beyond a croak. Lucky for me, I didn't have to get up to bang on the door with my walking stick since the room was so small. I could sit here and do it. How long would Faust keep me waiting?
More and more, I just wanted out of here, never mind the package and the money.This had been such a terrible idea. There had to be another way to get money. I could steal it, maybe from this tavern. Or I could go somewhere else and try to work for that kind of money over the next couple of days with my shitty, still-healing body. There had to be another way, though, because this wasn’t working.
I rose, slowly, my very bones creaking, and turned to explore my options in this room. Behind me, my fingers hit a pane of arctic glass. A window. Narrow. Really narrow. I searched along the other walls, but that was the only one. I returned to it, found the latch, jammed the heel of my palm against it to make it budge.
Could I make it—
The door opened behind me. I whirled around, and a wall of spruce and dirt scents pushed toward me while heavy, confident footsteps thudded inside.
"Well. Kane Song’s daughter." Faust, I guessed. His voice was gravelly but with a lot of boldness behind it.
I tried to blank my face even though my insides recoiled. He was a wolf shifter, and not the good kind like I was used to. How many had he killed with my baba’s poison?
"I gotta say, this is a surprise. I expected your pa on the first of the month." A chair dragged across the floor and then creaked as he sat. "Not today, and certainly not you. Alone."
I cleared my throat, even drier now, my tongue growing thick. No time for nerves though. I had to literally sell my lie. "I left on the first of the month, but am only just arriving today. I was attacked in the Crimson Forest." Better to start with the truth, I supposed.
"Yes," he said, "I would imagine you were."
"But my baba never was," I blurted, then scolded myself internally. That wasn't part of my script.
"No, he wasn't. Your pa had permission."
And then it clicked. Of course he did. He was the one who was supposed to make the delivery each month, not me. The wolves in the Crimson Forest must’ve known I didn’t belong and attacked.
A long pause while I could feel him staring at me. "Your pa never told you, did he?"
"He never told me a lot of things,” I admitted.
"Curious, though, that he didn't tell you he hired someone else to make the delivery for him, a little later than was scheduled because your old man is sick."
"Hired? Sick?"What? No, he'd handed the package to me and told me to hide at Lee and Jade's. We didn't have money to hire someone when we could barely afford to survive…
Realization, sharp with many corners, dragged through me. No, not hired. The bald man who'd stolen the package from me… He'd delivered it, late, with some sorry excuse that my baba was sick. Since I’d been in the Slipjoint Forest when he’d taken it, he’d likely taken that route to get here safely. You could get from Margin’s Row to Old Man’s Den while avoiding the Crimson Forest, but it would take a lot longer. The bald man obviously had.
Shit. So if he’d already delivered it…
"So, I'm sorry,” Faust said, “but I've already got this month's supply and won't need any more until after winter."
Panic burned up my throat, so raw and fierce that I thought I might scream. I had to make him listen, do whatever was necessary so he’d pay me.
"I have something better than what he gave you." I fished the fake poison from my pocket and laid it on the table between us, a temptation wrapped in hope. "It's twice as potent."
