Maybe not.
Maybe prisoners are holed up here somewhere.
Maybe innocents seeking shelter.
I should care more.
I should be filled with worry that isn’t for myself.
But all I really want to stew in is the urge to talk to Bee—to tell her what happened, to ask her to dissect it for me, to help me understand.
No.
If she was here, with me, I…
I don’t think I would tell her.
She would probably punch him, or try to, and then her spine would be out of her body, and I would die from the heartache.
This isn’t like other guys I kept around, one for each need, a few at a time who liked to call me their girlfriend and beg for me to meet their parents.
This isn’t like the other guys I used over the years, the ones drawn to my distance, the ones who yearned to win my love, like it was a competition, a game.
This…
This is feeling a lot more like life and death than it ever has before.
SIX
I’m not kidding when I say I’ve been sitting here for hours, huddled up to the join of the walls, arms wrapped around my knees.
Condensation climbs up the window through the bars—a window that cracked from some stray hail a while ago, when Shark was filing his brown nails into even sharper talons.
The storm doesn’t let up.
And every crack I hear has me flinching—because what if the window is hit again, and there’s an explosion of glass shards bursting into the cell.
Like the shrapnel from the shotgun…
I was collateral to that guy. But in the chaos of it all, the blur of movements, and the pull of the trigger, I don’t quite get how I wasn’t hit.
Samick moved me out of the way. Practically flung me around the shower post, until pipes and tiles shielded me.
But not a single piece of shrapnel got me?
That. That holds my brain in a fierce grip.
Time passes in the cell, but my chin stays stuck to my drawn-up knees.
Even though Shark has taken to cleaning out something that looks like a miniature flute, I don’t move—not just because I’mrooted in place with Samick’s absence, but because of what happened in the shower block.
I swear, I swear on my life—Samick stopped the water raining down from the showerhead. Stopped it mid-air, hardened it to ice… then fucking fired it at the shrapnel.
Little weapons of icicles speared right into the shrapnel, blocking and taking it all down at once.
Samick hadn’t even turned to face the man yet.
He was still holding me to him.
