Ikept my face as neutral as possible, thinking back to all those nights I spent bluffing my ass off with a fan of cards in my hand and a pile of candy spread out on an upturned crate, like a sugar addict's wet dream.
“Information?” he repeated the word as if I was wasting my breath. “And you think I’m about to give it to you, do you?” he jeered.
“In return for what you want, yes, I think you will,” I tested with every ounce of fake confidence I knew he had started to fall for.
“Freedom?” He laughed. “Do you think I’m stupid? You expect me to believe you’d simply open the door after I gave you what you want?”
“Obviously not,” I replied, slipping some honesty in there for good measure because, like he said, he wasn’t stupid and pretending he was would get me nowhere.
“But we both want the same thing. I want my friend back. And you want a new vessel, seeing as this one is going to expire sooner rather than later,” I said, winging this part as I really had no clue if it was true or not. But making assumptions and reading his facial expressions had gotten me this far, so it was worth a shot.
“I cannot die,” he stated with an air of arrogance.
“Maybe not,” I said with a shrug. “But you can be weakened. And I’m guessing that wouldn’t be useful to your master right now.” Oh yeah, now that struck a nerve.
“What do you suggest?” he asked, his jaw ticking.
“We have powerful mages. There may be a way to extract you.” I didn’t know much about the mages, nothing in fact, but I at least knew enough that they had been able to strengthen his cell. So, not wanting to break the habit of all this bluffing I had going on, I decided to roll with the assumption. “All I need is information,” I said, but he huffed.
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t give it to you,” he admitted in a bitter tone, as if hating the weakness shown by telling me there was something he was powerless to fight against.
“Why not?” I asked making a tick in his jaw jump in annoyance.
“I am forbidden,” he gritted out.
“Forbidden how?”
“We are forbidden from speaking his name or what he has planned. So even if I wished to make this bargain with you, you would gain nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“I do not lie,” he practically growled and, unfortunately, while I knew that was false, I could tell that what he said about being forbidden was true. I turned away, running a hand through my hair as I thought about it, when it finally hit me. He was forbidden, but someone else wasn’t.
“No, but he can,” I stated, making him raise a brow.
“Who do you speak of?”
“Riley. He can tell me,” I said firmly, making his lip curl.
“No, he can’t.” And there it was, that little tell. That twitch in his left eye. The bluff I had been looking out for again.
“Now I know you're lying because if you can access his memories, then it goes both ways. He has access to your thoughts, too, doesn’t he?” His silence was proof enough.
“Fine. Just what exactly are you proposing?” he asked with a snarl.
“Let Riley through, let me speak to him. Ask him what you can’t tell me, and then we will extract you safely from him.” I didn’t know exactly how we were going to do that. Because, well, I wasn’t about to drag some poor unsuspecting fool in here and exchange their life for Riley’s, no matter how much I wanted him back. Thankfully, his next words filled me with relief.
“I have a body.”
“What do you mean?”
“My body is where I left it when I entered this one,” he affirmed with ease, as if we were talking about the weather and not some rotting corpse left to decompose somewhere that he wanted dragged in here.
“Okay, we can go and retrieve your body and put you back in it.” Those were words I never thought I would be speaking out loud. “How about that?”
“And you can promise that, can you?” he said, his eyes widening like he was really thinking about this.
“We want the same thing here, so yes, I can give you my word.” Then, finally, after a long moment that felt like a lifetime, he nodded.
