“Any profit to Morland is profit to our great King Edmund. Long live the King.” The Warden turned to her again, the heat from the lamp approaching too close to her face. “Would you not agree, madam?” When she did not respond, he laughed—a thin, weedysound that grated on her ears. “An Algaraan, aren’t you? Surely you should have more sympathy for the country that offered you shelter than your own kin who have been nothing but criminals?”
“Warden,” St. Silas interrupted. “Have I ordered you to stop?”
The Warden stared at her for a moment longer. His blue eyes bulged in his thin face, reminding Leena of a bug, and she stared back at him with the same amount of ugly vehemence. Finally, he wrenched himself away to lead them farther on. Leena, the headache now throbbing in her temples, dragged her feet after him. St. Silas took up the rear.
They walked for a spell before the Warden halted in front of cell number 342. Ahead of them, the corridor stretched even farther on into stark blackness.
“Colson,” the Warden spat.
Behind the bars were only a single bed, an empty pewter plate scraped clean, and a steel bowl meant for refuse. A sleepy groan was emitted by a lump on the mattress, and what Leena had mistaken for a pile of blankets was actually a man. He was starved to the bone, so thin that his clothes enveloped his body.
“What did he do?” Leena whispered. Ghosts came to her in every state—bruised, beaten, bloodied—so she’d grown used to seeing the dead in misery. But seeing the living in this state was jarring.
The Warden looked at St. Silas, who gave a short nod, before continuing, “Murdered his business partner.”
Another groan spewed from the bundle of bones on the mattress.
“Leave us, pray,” St. Silas said, handing the Warden a coin.
The Warden didn’t move. “You wouldn’t hurt him?”
“Am I not a gentleman?”
The Warden’s panicked eyes met Leena’s. Evenshedidn’t know how to answer that question. Finally, he gave a jerky nod.
“Then leave us,” St. Silas repeated.
Just as the Warden turned away, Leena grasped his arm. “Please,sir, could you tell me if an Ali Al-Sayer is alive in this prison? He was sentenced for life nearly three years ago for attempting to start a union.”
The Warden’s mouth formed a thin stubborn line.
“Answer her,” St. Silas commanded.
“The prison houses many immigrants. We are not given proper papers for most of them,” the Warden replied grudgingly, shrugging away from her grip. “We only hold them. We do not seek to differentiate them.”
Her cheeks burning, she kept direct eye contact with the Warden and wiped her hands on her dress as if she’d touched something rotten. The Warden’s frown deepened before he turned back the way they had come, his footsteps drifting farther and farther away.
She turned to look at the prisoner again, blinking away the wetness from her eyes.
“How do you know the prisoner?” Leena asked, trying to speak through the burning in her throat.
“He is a former secretary of mine,” was St. Silas’s easy response.
She looked sharply at him.
St. Silas rapped his knuckles against the steel bars, eliciting another grumble from the prisoner. An eye poked out, then a tuft of matted hair. Then Colson caught sight of St. Silas and lurched forward, stretching his arm through the bars toward the Saint, who positioned himself just out of reach.
Through the litany of the prisoner’s curses, St. Silas said quietly to her, “I could not have given you a better opportunity.”
Sweat slid down her back. Her eyes searched the cell, her heart pounding, desperation collecting like a scream in her sternum. Nothing, nothing, nothing…
There!
She almost cried out in relief.
A figure—so still; they were always so still—stood over the prisoner.
She reeled off a description of the spirit. “A young man, russet-colored hair, a crooked nose, and…and…and a hole through his left temple.”
