Someone’s coming.
I shove the knife in my back pocket and stand to see who it is.
Caleb has to duck as he descends from the stairs. Now hiding in the shadows, I can’t see him, but Caleb’s sultry voice is hard to mistake as anyone else. “Are you enjoying the amenities?”
“Amenities?” I look around the room, confused. Then I notice what he is referring to. I chuck my thumb over my shoulder like a hitchhiker, sticking my chin out like a chicken. “Do you mean the bucket?”
His silence confirms he means my glorified toilet.
I shrug, not wanting to give him the satisfaction that any of this is getting to me. “Beats defecating in the woods, I guess.” A chair in his hand screeches as he drags it across the floor, making me jump. He stops at my cell, positions his chair facing my bars, then plops down, bread in hand.
I scrunch my nose in disgust. “You’re going to eat down here?”
He tosses and flips the bread with one hand, watching it. “No. This is an incentive for you.”
“To do what?”
“To talk.”
I’m about to tell him I’m not hungry, but I’m quickly silenced by the growling of my stomach.
Caleb hears it, too, lifting a brow. “Let’s get started. Why did you attack Bloodhound?”
“I didn’t attack you. I just got too close and your men pounced on m—”
“Not yesterday,” he says. “Your attack five months ago.”
My jaw drops.“Your attack,”he said.
It wasn’t just me. I consider his question a moment, then decide what’s done is done, and the leaders who would have not wanted us silent are dead.
And I’m hungry.
“Because Colin wanted Alaina.”
He tears a piece of bread off, places it onto a plate and sets the plate on the floor. He kicks it, and it slides smoothly under the bars to me.
I devour the bread and push the plate back, ready for more.
He tears another piece. “How many of you are there?”
“I don’t know. Hundreds, maybe? Some of us split after Colin’s death.”
Again, we slide the plate back and forth. Each question I answer, he rewards me with bread.
“Split where?”
“Some of them went back to their former packs asking to be let back in. Others killed themselves, scared of retaliation. Some stayed. Others... I don’t know.”
“Next question.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a plastic bag with raspberries in it. My favorite. “Who killed the alpha?”
My eyes go wide, and my breath hitches. I wait for an explanation, a whole speech of how he knew it was me, but instead, he’s mute.
He waits patiently, though his jaw ticks.
Do I deny it? Do I tell him? I guess there’s no harm in it. They’re going to kill me anyway, the right thing to do would be to confess.
I take a deep breath, look him dead in the face and shrug. “I don’t know.”
