“Show me,” the man says.
“What?”
“Show me they’re on your tongue.”
Fuck.
The slit of light feels narrower all of a sudden.
“I said show me,” the man repeats.
My pulse thunders in my ears.
“I took them,” I rasp.
“Open.”
I can feel Hailey’s stare drilling into the side of my face, begging and terrified at the same time.
The flap shifts. There’s a click, soft and mechanical, from the other side of the padding, like a lock being turned inside a wall. Then the rectangle widens by a fraction and cold air slides in, along with something else.
It’s black.
A gun.
“Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” he asks. “I know you didn’t take them.”
My throat tightens so hard it hurts. My whole body wants to recoil, but there’s nowhere to go.
I lift my hands. He can see the pills in my right palm.
“Now be good,” he says, “and put them in your mouth. Tongue out. When I tell you to swallow, you do it.”
My hand shakes as I bring the pills to my mouth. For a stupid, delusional half-second, I consider biting down on them, crushing them, spitting the powder right back through his precious little hatch like a curse.
But the gun twitches, and I simply slip the pills onto my tongue.
They taste chalky.
“Tongue out,” he orders.
I open my mouth and stick my tongue out into the light.
“Good,” he says. “Now swallow.”
The pills drag down dry, scraping a raw line through the bruise already living inside me.
“Again,” he snaps. “Open.”
I open my mouth again.
“Lift your tongue.”
I lift it. He keeps going with the instructions, one after another, making me open wider, then wider still, until my jaw clicks and pain spikes bright behind my eyes.
It’s humiliating, and it’s painful in a way my body remembers too well.
“Ah,” he says finally, satisfied. “There we go.”
