“You wanted food. So eat.”
She frowned and forced her exhausted head to turn. In front of her on the floor was … She blinked.
A bag of apples. And a bag of carrots. And three plastic water bottles.
The sight was so bizarre—fresh, colorful produce, the inside of the plastic wet with condensation, amid this hellish pit of isolation—that she had to stare for several seconds before it sank in.
When it did, she sat up with strength she didn’t know she had and snatched up the bag of apples. Her left hand responded to the movement with a pain so sharp, she cried out.
When she glanced down, her fingers were swollen and purple.
“F-fuck,” she stammered, realizing she’d forgotten to loosen the bandage he’d tied on her. Her arm was going to fall off if she didn’t get this fucking this off.
She lifted her head, pinning the demon before her with the fiercest glare she could muster, and held out her arm. “Take it off.”
She hated how her voice shook. But she was weak and traumatized, and she was doing her best. She swore anew to kill this piece of shit for doing this to her, but for now she had to make sure she kept all her fingers.
“Take it off or my fucking fingers are gonna fall off,” she snapped when he just stared at her with a slightly cocked head.
He looked down at her arm. “I wonder if they would regenerate.” He was muttering again, like he was talking to himself. “Would be interesting to test.”
“Take it off!” she shouted with a forcefulness she didn’t feel.
His gaze snapped to hers and his brows rose. How did he have dark eyebrows and lashes, but white hair? The contrast was bizarre.
He reached out, and then those ice-cold fingers wrapped around her arm, dwarfing it against his skeletal hands. A shudder rolled through her at his touch.
He untied the bandage with creepy black claws, and she cursed colorfully as the blood rushed back into her throbbing fingers. It felt like she was being tortured by a mad acupuncturist and dipping her hand into boiling water at the same time.
Her teeth began to chatter, and her head spun. She didn’t have the strength to handle pain on top of everything else.
She used her good hand to awkwardly tear open the bag of apples. Pulling one through the hole in the plastic, she sank her teeth into it, unable to stifle a moan as the sweet flavor filled her mouth. She took several more bites, lost in thedeliciousness of the apple, until she suddenly became aware of eyes on her. She looked up and found Murmur watching her.
While she was preoccupied, he’d sat down across the cell, his back against the opposite wall, one arm draped over his bent knee. His enslaved souls were dimly visible in the gloom, moving like lingering smoke. He stared at her, but she could tell by the vacant look in his eyes that he was somewhere far away in his head.
She ignored him and went back to her apple, eating the entire thing, core and all. When she was finished, the feeling had returned to her hand enough for her to gingerly use it to open the bag of carrots.
She’d never particularly cared for raw carrots, but now they tasted damn near as good as the apple, the crunchy vegetables full of flavor and vitality. She swore never to turn her nose up at a carrot again.
After eating two, she forced herself to stop, though she was hungry enough to finish the entire bag. She wanted to ration her food since she didn’t know when this fucker would deign to feed her again, and she didn’t want to make herself sick by eating too much at once.
Murmur’s brow was creased in a frown, and he was muttering something under his breath that she couldn’t discern. He jerked his chin away, only to suddenly jerk it back the other way and snap, “That’s ridiculous.”
He shook his head roughly and growled, “Impossible.”
Was he … arguing with himself?
His head suddenly snapped forward, and his gaze sharpened on hers in a way that told her he was actually paying attention now.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. She’d die before she let him see her weakness. “Where did you get the food?” she forced herself to ask.
“From my garden,” he deadpanned.
She blinked.
He rolled his eyes. “I went to Earth and took it from a supermarket.”
“Took … as in stole.”
