He huffed. “It’s not convenient.”
Convenience was a really loose word to describe this.
I slowly and very, very painfully rolled down, holding back whimpering until I was spread out on the floor too. I knit my hands together, ignoring the way they were shaking despite the weight of the cuff, and set them over my chest. I tried to take another breath and stopped when it felt like getting stabbed.
I had to think.
We’d been kidnapped for all intents and purposes. It hadn’t been a dream, and I wasn’t being pessimistic. This was reality.
It was also fucking freezing in here.
Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried to tell myself that this wasn’t the end of the world.
I was still alive, so I was winning on that end. For a minute there, I’d thought it was all over. But it wasn’t.
Once I’d managed to calm myself down as much as I was pretty sure I was capable of considering the situation, I asked in my most polite voice, which honestly sounded like I was deranged and not very polite at all because I was on the verge of panicking, “Are you not losing your shit because you know something I don’t?”
“I know… a lot of things… you don’t” was how he decided to reply, the ball of sunshine.
I gritted my teeth and tried to strangle my patience closer to my heart. I tried my best to calm down and put things into perspective. One step at a time. One minute at a time. I knew better than to freak out. You made mistakes when you acted impulsively, and I was in no position to make more.
First things first: “Do you know where we are?”
“No,” he answered immediately.
Okay. Fortunately, he was responding. “Do you know if there are cameras in here? Microphones?” He had to be able to hear them or sense them or something, I was pretty sure considering he was the one who had known that they had been at the gate.
There was a beat of silence before he replied with “No.” He lifted the cuff on his wrist like that explained everything.
It didn’t, and I wasn’t sure I trusted that there wasn’t something in here that could communicate back to them somehow. We had to be careful with what we said. Another choke rose up in my throat, but I fought it down before trying to ask calmly, “You said you don’t know where we are, but do you haveanyidea where we could be?”
I dropped my head to the side to focus on him. He still looked almost serene. But some tiny muscle in his cheek moved, and I could tell he thought about how to answer that. I’d known he was full of shit telling me he didn’t know where we were. “I’ve got… a good idea.”
I knew it! I opened my mouth, then closed it. Then I peeked around the room, thinking. Talking to him in Spanish was out of the question. Portuguese was a better choice, but a Spanish speaker could piece together some words.
“How?” I asked him in Korean.
His head slowly turned toward me.
“Do you understand me? I don’t want them to know what we are talking about,” I said, sticking to the language I’d learned from the family that had babysat me until we’d moved away for the first time. I was pretty sure that’s how I’d picked it up so easily, my little brain had been a sponge back then. After we’d moved away, I’d had a Korean American teacher at one school who had worked with me a couple times a week. The rest I’d picked up by streaming every K-drama I could find and listening and reading subtitles over and over again, repeating everything to get the pronunciation right.
The Defender’s gaze narrowed and then, in Korean, he replied, “I wasn’t… sleeping when they… brought us here.”
I rolled onto my side to get a better look at him. He was still on his back, his arms beside his body. His chest rose slowly before falling at the same pace.
Breathe. Calm down.I didn’t need to panic.
Easier said than done though.
“Youletthem take you?” I had told him to leave. I knew I had. I’d fucking screamed it at the top of my lungs.
His purple eyes flashed for a brief moment before the bright color faded just as quickly as I’d seen it. I’d surprised him, and he’d surprised me by talking to me in flawless Korean right back. “I did notletthem… take me. I would not have been… in a position… to be taken if I’d been… healing the way I should’ve. The only reason… you’re here is because you kept this a secret.”
Was he serious?
I switched back to English. “I told you to run!” I snapped at him in a hiss that surprised me.Calm down. But really, how could he turn this around on me? I had to calm down. Everything wasn’t fine, but it wasn’t crazy dire either unless there were vents I couldn’t see that were eventually going to spew poisonous gases. “I thought something was off. I told you to go. Before I went outside, I warned you.”
The stare he pinned me with was incredulous.
