Because I can’t wave my hand in front of my face. Even if I tried. Something scrapes against my wrists as I try to tug my left hand free.
The daunting sound of my own breath is too loud, too human, too isolated.
“Hello?” I whisper with a burning dry throat and mouth.
The silence that follows stretches wide across the still atmosphere, abundant with the possibility of movement. Of another heartbeat.
“This must be hell.” A deep, groggy voice punctures the smothering blackness.
The desire to flinch recoils as I recognize the man behind the sound.
“Niklaus.” I exhale. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I need water.
“Are your wrists bound?”
I take a deep breath in, then tug my arms in toward my chest, straining against the resistance keeping them splayed on either side of the mattress. A material cuffing my wrists, tough and smooth? Not metal but not rope either. Maybe leather?
I nod in response to his question.
Silence.
He can’t see me. Stupid.
“Yes.”
His breath is calm and patient, yet tense as we sit and think.
“I didn’t travel,” I blurt out in a whisper. At least, I don’t think I did. “There arefeelingsI get when it happens. It didn’t. I just—”
“Blacked out.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Niklaus’s calming breaths continue.
“Oh god…do you think Uncle Niles is okay? We must have been attacked…”
“No one attacked us, Spitfire,” Niklaus says spitefully.
My pupils strain to catch even a speckle of light, returning some sanity back to my brain. He’s just an isolated voice in this gloomy, chilled atmosphere. Maybe thisishell.
“Then…” I narrow my eyes. “What’s going on? You know something.”
He doesn’t respond for what feels like several minutes. I wonder if I’m hallucinating his voice so my brain can cope with the isolation.
“Are you the—”
“Has your mother ever told you about my dad’s past?” he asks quietly.
I relax my head against the firm mattress. “Like their time in the prison?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
“He was an asylum patient, Spitfire.”Embarrassment. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Niklaus Demechnef embarrassed in our whole lives.
“For what?”
