I roll my eyes. “I need help!”
They snicker. “Bossy must be snorting too much of the stage fumes! She’s on a paranoia ride!”
“I’m looking for a prisoner—he has black hair and intense blue eyes. Good fighter. A few inches taller than you three. I don’t see him in here!”
“Yum yum! Big blue eyes, don’t mind if I do, Mama!”
“Please. I just need to know if he’s alive. His name is Niklaus.” I’m shaking from head to toe, unable to sit still. What if he didn’t make it? What if I lost him for good?
The women stop laughing and go entirely still. Silent conversations are had between their eyes, once full of amusement, now undoubtedly curious and slightly timid.
“Niklaus,” the middle one repeats.
“Yes!” I blow out an anxious breath.
“He’s alive,” the woman on the left answers cautiously.
I fall back on my butt and laugh-cry into my hands.
“Did you know him on the outside?” they ask.
“Yeah,” I mumble into my hand.
“Oooof. How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? You must have been a child when you last saw him then!”
It takes me a few seconds.
One, two, three, four, five…
A child…
“I’ve always wanted to know what that gloomy knight was like before he got here!”
I rock back onto my knees in front of them, plastering my hands to my chest as I beg for my ears to be so wrong, so incorrect about that subtle hint.
“Go back…” I rasp, tears rimming my eyes. “What…what does that mean? I must have been a child…?”
Please, no. Please, God, tell me I’m wrong.
“That prisoner has been locked up for what?” The middle woman looks between the other two and shrugs. “A decade? You’re so young. You must have been just a little girl dumpling when you saw him last!”
My stomach drops and each vital organ threatens to stop working. I double over, gasping into my fist, grunting through the shock of it all.
“No! No! No! I don’t know if I can move again to a more specific date! I could end up finding him again years later! Oh god, what do I do?!” I’m hyperventilating, shivering, wrapping my arms around my waist and praying this is just a nightmare.
He’ll never forgive me!
The women adjust their feet, unsure how to comfort this breakdown. But nothing they say would matter to me right now. All I can hear is my own heartbeat. The sound of Niklaus’s screams when he used his body to shield me from the acid shower. The blank look on his face when the slayer sword came down on his fingers. How easily they were separated from his hand. And he didn’t react. He stared at the dismemberment as his brain clearly fought to protect itself.
“…that’s what I heard, anyway. He could have escaped with those two teens, eight or nine years ago. What were their names? Soap and Jaspy?”
“Sophia and Jack?!” I blurt out.
“Sure. Whatever. He’s known to be a master escape artist here. But he always comes back. No one really knows why.”
I’m gripping the back of the stadium seat so hard, my nails are bending and breaking off.
“They haven’t killed him for trying to escape?” I ask.
