Blood burst from her lip. For the first time in years, she’d forgotten to be wary of her teeth.
Mr. Fairchild made a noise of polite distress. “Oh, dear. One of you—get something for her, will you?” A guard handed him a bottle of water and a packet of wipes, and he passed them to her, pulling his hand back quickly. “It will all be over soon. I have other business to attend to, but my offer stands. Make yourself at home. Eat something. Drink. Keep your strength up. I’ll return you to your parents a whole person, not a starved urchin.”
He really believed it. That was what shook her, as he smiled at her and ordered two guards to stay with her before he disappeared out the door. He believed everything he said.
He thought he was being kind to her.
She looked down at the makeshift first-aid kit. The metal birds had trusted him, and he had put them in a cage. She was still manacled to the chain. Fairchild’s kindness was of a sort specific to his creepy little mind. Which… helped.
Because if he hadn’t thrown her into a half-swamped cage and chained her like a dog, she might have believed him.
A whole person. The beautiful young woman you were meant to be.
Would Moss like her better, if she wasn’t like this?
She stood, gathering up the trailing chain like some sort of kinky accessory, and let her feet take her around the cabin. It was carpeted; even with the chain, she didn’t make a noise.
The guards stationed at the door tensed in the way that meant something in their brains had transferred her from thesmall and helplesscategory to thefreaky and dangerouscategory. Which might be helpful. Even though stuck like this, there wasn’t much she could do other than creep them out.
The cabin was decked out with heavy wooden furniture and lots of brass fittings. Glass-fronted bookshelves lined the walls, full of leatherbound books that looked like they hadn’t been touched since they were put there. The desk down the far end had a sepia-toned globe on it.
The whole room was playing at being a Victorian gentleman’s study, the same way Fairchild was playing at being a gentle man.
And people think I’m creepy.She trailed one finger along the desk. The globe was positioned so that if you were sitting in the big, winged armchair behind it, you would see Antarctica. Which had a red-topped pin in it, because of course it did. How did you even get a pin into a globe? Weren’t they made of solid plastic?
She looked closer. Metal globe, magnetic pin. Pins, plural. A series of smaller silver magnetic dots made a line across the ocean, from the tip of South America to the frozen continent. Was he plotting a route?
“He—he makes us move them each day. When the tracking updates come through?”
Carol looked up. The guard who’d spoken went pale, while his partner madeshut-up-shut-upgestures. “What?”
“He-he-he wants it kept up to date, so we—”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
Carol stared at the two men’s white, terrified faces. She was still moving, of course, but slowly, controlled, like a well-oiled machine. Predatory.
This was the point where she would normally collapse into nervous chit-chat or get flustered and knock things off the table in her hurry to get away or, in more cases than she liked to admit even to herself, start crying.
Instead, she kept her eyes locked on the sweating guard and prowled slowly around the desk.
“What tracking updates?”
“Th-the other boats?”
“What other boats?”
“Th-the rest of the—”
“Shutup!” the other guard hissed.
Carol stalked closer, her steps so oil-smooth that one rolled into the next without stopping, but slow enough that she could almosthearthe guards’ heartbeats race with anticipation.
Which she could. If she let herself. And there was no one else here except two assholes who were literallyguardingher for the guy who’dkidnappedher, so why the hell not? Why make herself small and inoffensive and hide everything that people feared about her, for people likethis?
She smiled, slow and wide, and both guards’ eyes dropped, horrified, to her teeth. “Whatareyou both?”
“Hngt,” the first guard said.
