“Just a quarrel. Not lovers.” Niklaus cannot hide his disdain.
“Oh. Relatives?” my uncle asks with a slight quiver in his voice.
I let out a happy sigh as I lick my fingers. “Nope. I just don’t date eunuchs.”
“Eunuch?” Uncle Niles raises his eyebrows at his son, then glances down at his crotch.
Niklaus’s face falls, and his eyes narrow on me. “My dick is very much still intact.”
“Is it?” I sip on my tea with a pinky up. But the taste hits wrong—too bitter, too heavy. “I hear the ladies in town can never find it when they go looking for it.”
The right corner of his mouth tilts upward.
“Quite the treasure hunt with little to no reward.” I wink at Uncle Niles but am confused as my eyes start to roll in the back of my head.
The room tilts.
A heaviness collapses on top of me.
“Well, you two certainly don’t like each other very—”
12. “He Who Shared My Bread Has Turned Against Me.”
I can still taste thebitter tea on my tongue.
A touch of drafty air drags me out of a waterlogged state.
And for the briefest of moments, I have forgotten I exist at all.
The floating sensation is followed by drowning, spinning, falling, choking…
Can’t breathe.
Bitter taste.
Can’t breathe.
My survival instincts flicker on groggily, and I drudge myself out of the weighted fever dream, breaking through an invisible lake of deep sleep to tilt my head to the side, and allow a river of sour contents to spew from my parted mouth. The splash hits the floor followed by a groan that must be my own because my numb chest tingles and vibrates from the effort.
Are my eyes open? Closed?
Am I on a boat? Am I alive?
Floating, spinning, falling, tilting off the side of the earth and…
My mouth gapes open as more of my stomach is emptied. This time, the thick splatter echoes against walls. A floor. A ceiling.
I breathe in through my nose, filling my lungs with a stale smell, like wet earth trapped in a moldy box. It’s familiar yet warped and off-putting. A cold, fungal breath that rises from the walls and whispers,You don’t belong here.
No, I don’t.Where am I?
The vile rank of my own vomit wafts back up to my face. I roll my head back to center, recognizing the feel of a creaky mattress under my head.What the hell?
Against the blanket of sleep that holds down my eyelids, I blink slowly to try and wake myself up. It’s like wading through a pool of sludge. I blink again, unsure if I’m actually doing it or just imagining I am.
Pitch black. No difference if my eyes are closed or not.
I could have my hand in front of my face and see nothing. An absence of light, of space. As if the visceral darkness has a set of teeth, and it’s grinning at me for being blind and helpless and nowscared.
