He leans close. His black hair hangs into his eyes, lank and filthy from our days locked in this cell. I’m sure I’m no better. “So this is all it would’ve taken to break the King’s Justice?” he says. “A few days in a cage?”
I spit blood at him. “Eat shit.”
“Well, that’s not very princely.” He reaches for something, and I try to take advantage of his moment of distraction to wrench free, but he’s too quick. Lochlan grabs a fistful of my hair and twists it tight.
It’s so sharp and unexpectedly painful that it pulls a yelp from my throat. I grab hold of his wrist, but his grip on my hair is too tight and I just hurt myself. “What the hell iswrongwith—”
“Here.” He holds a biscuit in front of my face. “Eat it and I’ll let you go.”
I stare at him like he’s crazy.
He gives my hair another wrench. “Eat, you idiot!”
“Fine!” I bite into the biscuit and tear a piece free.
Lochlan looks at me like he’s waiting to make sure I chew, so I do, glaring at him petulantly the whole time. It’s not themosthumiliating thing I’ve ever done, but it likely ranks among the top five.
“Good,” he says. He finally lets go of my hair and climbs off me.
I launch myself at him againimmediately.
This time he ends up with a scrape down the side of his face, and he’ll probably have a black eye by nightfall. Unfortunately, so will I. This struggle ends with me facedown and inhaling dirt, his knee in my back, his hand twisting my hair again.
He finds the biscuit where it fell, blows dirt off the edge, and holds it in front of my face. “Ready for more?”
I inhale to tell him something even less princely, but it’s like the first bite of biscuit woke my stomach. I actually am hungry now.
“Let me up,” I grind out. “I’ll eat.”
I expect him to force-feed me each bite anyway, but to my surprise, he lets me go. I gingerly rearrange my limbs until I’m sitting cross-legged, and I swipe the biscuit from his hand. I tear another piece free and chew, and suddenly it’s all I can do to keep from shoving the whole thing in my mouth.
“Slow,” Lochlan says. “It won’t do either of us any good if you throw it all up.”
“Shut up.” I don’t look at him. I shove hair back from my face and try to ignore the ache in my scalp from where he yanked.
But I force myself to take small bites, because he’s right.
The sun has risen further, bright through the trees. It makes my head ache. I want to curl up in the corner again.
Lochlan rises to his knees, and I tense, ready for him to attack me again, but he just holds out a small steel cup of water. “You need to drink, too,” he says.
I don’t take it. “What do you care?”
“If you make me hold you down and pour it down your throat, we’ll end up wasting half.”
I glare back at him—but he’s likely serious, so I take the cup, then take a sip.
I follow it with a longer swallow, because he was right about thewater, too. By the time I set down the cup, I’m looking for the rest of the food that Lina brought.
There are boiled eggs and roasted chicken legs and salted potatoes that have been cooked so long that the skin has gone crispy, the insides soft. Surprisingly good food for prisoners, but I suspect this is just whatever is left over from the food that Oren Crane’s people prepare for themselves. I didn’t get agoodlook at them in the darkness of that first night, but there were only ten of them on the beach, and it probably would’ve been more work to prepare us something less filling.
Lochlan sits across from me, eating his own. “And you were going to turn this down,” he says, mildly chiding.
I keep my eyes on my food. I still haven’t really looked at him. My pride is smarting from the way he pinned me to the ground and shoved a biscuit in my face. “You should’ve left me alone, and you could’ve had twice as much.”
“I’m not watching you kill yourself.”
That draws my gaze up. He’s not looking at me either. His eyes are shadowed, his heavily freckled skin more tanned from our days on theDawn Chaser. His sleeves are rolled back, revealing a dozen burn scars along his forearms, likely earned from working in the forges in Steel City. I broke his left wrist weeks ago, but he’s long since lost the bandage he was wearing on the ship. It can’t be fully healed yet, but it’s not like we’re getting any medical attention in this cell.
