15
JAIME
Consciousness returned in slow, heavy waves.
At first, I thought I was still on the ground outside the relief area. Everything felt wrong enough for that to make sense.
My head throbbed. My body felt like it had been poured full of wet cement and left to harden.
I tried to open my eyes. They barely cooperated.
When I finally managed to force them apart, the world swam in and out of focus. The room was dim. The only steady light came from a single exposed bulb hanging over a desk in the far corner.
I tried to move. Pain flared immediately, sharp enough to cut through the fog. My shoulders burned. My wrists screamed. My leg?—
My leg felt like it was on fire.
The memory returned in fragments: the water. Marion. The gun.
I tried to speak, to test my voice, but my jaw wouldn’t open more than a fraction before I felt rough fabric pulling tight across my mouth.
I forced myself to breathe slowly through my nose and take in my surroundings. Windows ran along one wall, but they’d been covered from the inside with some kind of dark material.
Not perfectly, though. Along one edge, a thin blade of daylight cut through.
It was morning already. How long had I been out?
I shifted again, more carefully this time, and nearly blacked out from the spike of pain in my shoulders. My arms were stretched above me, and when my vision steadied, I tipped my head back and caught the dull glint of metal around my wrists.
Handcuffs.
They were looped around a pipe overhead, forcing my arms up at an angle that made every muscle in my back strain. My legs were bound as well. When I tried to draw my knees in, something bit tight around my ankles.
“Finally up?”
The voice came from my right.
I turned my head slowly, squinting into the shadows. For a split second, panic flared. He was that close, barely a few feet away, and I hadn’t sensed him at all?
It was as if my wolf had been muffled, buried under something I couldn’t shake. All I noticed was the faint metallic tang in the air and the constant, gnawing burn in my leg. The silver bullet was still inside me.
Marion sat in a chair, leaning back as though this were a casual conversation instead of captivity. He reached up and flicked on another light above us.
The sudden brightness stabbed into my eyes. I squeezed them shut on instinct, then forced them open again.
My vision was still slightly blurred, but I could make him out now, watching me like I was a project he’d already started taking apart.
In his hands was something small and dark. It took me a moment to recognize he was holding my wallet.
He flipped it open, thumbing through it with idle curiosity.
“Thanks for this, by the way,” he said mildly.
He slid something free and held it up between two fingers. Even through the haze, I recognized the white card with the thin black stripe. My hotel key card.
He hummed in approval and slipped the card into his shirt pocket before returning to sift through my wallet, turning each item over as if expecting something more to fall out.
I kept my expression blank.
