Like me.
The older woman exhaled through her teeth, a long, rattling sound.
“Ah! You are trapped, aren’t you?”
My mouth was dry. I should scoff, dismiss it, but something in me refused to move, refused to deny the truth of what lay before her.
I clenched my fists.
“How do I escape?”
The woman’s fingers hovered over the last card.
“Escape? There is no escape, darling. Adapting is your only chance for survival. Befriend the nurses. Do as you’re told.”
The patients had finished their meager dinner and were wandering around like lost souls.
The young man was still murmuring, clenching his fists.
“Or do you think you can just declare yourself healed and walk back to your life of ball gowns and music tutors? That you’d find someone to choose you after—” she gestured around, “all this? Now, pick your next card.”
Hopelessness crushed into me like a tidal wave.
With shaking fingers, I reached for the card that would show my future.
And I laughed loud and bitterly as it was Death.
“What do you say about my future, eh?” I asked. The laugh caught in my throat.
But the woman didn’t answer. Like everyone in the refectory, she was looking at the door.
“And there he is, our very own angel of death,” she muttered through clenched teeth. She slouched and quickly collected her cards.
I glanced up. It was the stranger I had seen arriving earlier who strode into the refectory, followed by Vexley. Vexley stood a little straighter, smoothing his coat with trembling fingers.
The gas lantern light made the visitor’s hair and the buttons of his cutaway coat shimmer like molten gold.
That close, the visitor looked impossibly attractive.
The tarot reader’s grip tightened on my wrist.
“Don’t stare.” Her voice had lost its edge, gone quiet with fear. “Whoever leaves with him never returns.”
Too late.
Like a bird, mesmerized by the snake, I glanced at the haughty curl of his lips, at the straight line of his nose and quickly looked away.
The angel of death, she had called him.
As if to make his moniker justice, he moved along the patients with the lethal elegance of a predator.
The hush fell over the room like a noose tightening.
I knew he had seen me.
The soft clicking of his boots on the stained tiles approached me, and I caught his scent—of midnight boat rides and incense, of museum artifacts and sea breeze.
Chills ran down my spine when two gloved fingers traced my jawline and forced me to look up.
