“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t turn around,” he said at the same time. “Don’t look at me.”
He sounded terrified. Terrified of her? It made no sense, and she couldn’t dwell on it now, not when she was about to collapse from sheer terror. The guards had to come back, she thought. Bauer and Weber would see the madness of what Hartmann had done and return her to her cell. Rune himself had said Bauer was a sensible man, and she’d noticed his hesitation earlier. But why would she trust Rune or anything he said? He killed women.
And she was a woman. Vulnerable, unarmed, at his mercy.
No, she had to remember her training. If needed, she could be lethal even without her twin daggers. She wasn’t helpless, even if the last twenty-four hours had nearly broken her. It hadn’t been the prison, exactly, nor the cruelty of the guards. If she was feeling powerless, it was all because of the voice in her head telling her she’d failed. She’d left Saint Vivia’s Convent with a simple mission: revenge. She’d had one of the men responsible for her misery in her grasp, and she’d let him live.
Her current situation, as deplorable as it was, wasn’t irreversible, but the fact that she’d failed herself like that... She’d failed Matteo... That had humbled her, to say the least. Not broken her entirely, but if she didn’t do something about it,that was where she was headed. Her own perception of herself was skewed now. She’d thought she was a fighter, a merciless protector of the little she had left, of Matteo’s memory, and instead, she’d proven to be completely useless.
“I’m sorry,” Rune said.
“What for?” He was saying that a lot, and she filed the observation for later.
“For what he did to you.”
“You don’t know what he did to me,” she whispered.
“I won’t touch you, I promise.”
His breathing was erratic, as if he were hyperventilating. Without turning, she tried to estimate the distance between them. It seemed he’d moved, possibly a few inches to the right, to get even farther away from her.
“Why don’t you want me to look at you?” she asked.
“Because I’m hideous,” he said. “Why do you think they call me creature?”
She nodded. “All right. I won’t look at you, if you won’t look at me. I’ll keep my back to you, if you keep your back to me.”
“All right, I’ve turned around.”
Seraphina heard the rustle of straw as he sat on the floor, facing the wall. She waited a few beats before allowing herself to relax somewhat and loosen her grip on the metal bars. Slowly, she slid to the ground, gathering her legs under her and pressing her forehead to the cold iron. As the nerves coursing through her dissipated, she felt the chill of the cell seep into her feverish skin, and she welcomed it. Soon, she would be cold. Very cold, since her blanket had fallen off her shoulders when Hartmann had grabbed her, and now she was left without it.
“What now?” she asked.
“We’ll do whatever you want,” he said.
She scoffed. Whatever she wanted. She didn’t have any ideas, so she stayed silent. She needed to think, except she found shecouldn’t hold onto a single thought. Every little noise distracted her. She couldn’t focus on finding a solution when every change in Rune’s breathing set her teeth on edge, and every soft click of his tongue when he opened his mouth to say something but changed his mind made her heart race.
“I want...” she started. “I’ll wait here until they come back. Can you just stay there, and I’ll stay here?”
“Of course.”
It was uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t be long now. They had to feed them dinner, right? She’d beg if she had to.
Seraphina and Rune sat in silence. A minute felt like an hour. She thought about him asking her not to look at his face because he was hideous. She was curious. How ugly could he be? And in what way? Had he been born with a defect, or had his face been disfigured later in life? It was better not to ask. Now that she knew he’d killed more than one woman, she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. It was better not to even talk to him. It had been stupid of her to allow herself to feel any kind of kinship to someone who was clearly a monster of the lowest sort.
Three years into the relic war, Seraphina had adjusted her perception about the taking of lives. And before that, there had been twenty-three years of recurrent warfare across Europe before Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. Spilled blood soaked the earth, so much death and terror, so many horrors. One war ended and another began, this time in the Kingdom of Bavaria. The other European countries, depleted, decided to take a step back and watch from the sidelines. This time, the enemy was the sole creation of Bavaria, of the city of Ingolstadt itself, having been educated at Krähenstein Academy. He was the result of the many disputes festering inside the Sarumite Order, so he was the Order’s problem.
Seraphina knew the loss of lives was sometimes necessary. They made sense in the grand scheme of things, and as apragmatist, she wasn’t held back by questions of ethics, or morality, or what God wanted. Her own planned revenge – the death of four people, now five after being reminded of Hartmann and his cowardice – she saw as more than necessary. A requirement for the betterment of the world.
But what Rune had done was different. Killing women who earned their bread with their bodies... That was strictly for pleasure. Even thinking about it made her shake with newfound terror and deep-seated anger. Hartmann had put her in his cell hoping he would rape and eviscerate her. Or maybe the creature preferred to do it the other way around. Wouldn’t it be a nice surprise if instead, Seraphina pulled her shit together, remembered who she was, and bettered the world by ridding it of a serial killer?
“You’re cold,” he said. He must’ve heard her teeth chatter. “You can have my blanket. I’ll slide it over to you.”
“No, don’t you dare move closer. Throw it at me.”
She made sure to keep her head down in case he turned. The blanket brushed her arm as it fell in a heap at her side. Before wrapping it around herself, she brushed her fingers over the rough fabric to make sure it didn’t hide anything suspicious. It was fairly clean, which was unexpected. It didn’t even smell that bad. There was a mustiness to it, yes, but also the smell of water and cool air, as if it had been hung near the window to dry.
