But I hear them.
Low, barbed murmurs.
They don’t talk quietly so I don’t hear what they’re saying. I can’t understand their language, so it’s as though they don’t want anyone outside of this cell to hear them.
I tug on my yellow rain jacket, one sleeve at a time, then pull up the zipper.
The screech either ends their conversation, or it comes at the same moment it naturally finishes, because once the zipper is tugged up to my collarbone, the cell is quiet again.
And a sudden shadow is looming over me.
I squint up at the sudden stretch of darkness.
Samick is towering over me. His frame swallows the faint ribbons of light that make it into the cell.
Looking down at me, he extends his hand—and hooked onto his finger is a scarf.
I don’t know which pocket he pulled that from in the split second it took for him to draw away from the other bunk and turn on me—but I know that this scarf isn’t mine.
He found it.
Probably when he was massacring people in the prison.
A huff grates out of me before I swipe it into my grip.
A better person might reject it.
But I throw the soft black material around my nape.
Samick crouches down, one knee pressing into the hard concrete floor.
I’m suddenly eyelevel with his cold stare, with irises that remind me of the flesh within a crisp green apple.
Dark lashes lower over those sharp green eyes—and I sense the warning in that look alone.
Samick’s icy tone is low, “You obey me, you survive. I say run—you run.”
All I can do is blink at him.
My mouth parts, as if to speak, but nothing comes out.
Then he snatches up my wrist and, with his other hand, tugs something out from a pocket.
I’ve gotten so used to leather that I recognise the muted glisten immediately. It unfurls from his pinched fingers—and I realise, it’s the thing he’s been working on lately. It’s the leather he had cut from a fae corpse. He sewed layers of wool onto it, then a buckle.
Now, I see the finished result.
It’s a sort of wrist strap.
A handmade cuff.
For me.
Samick fastens it around my wrist.
It glides over my flesh like butter and clouds.
Speechless, I watch as he buckles it—and it feels nothing like the rope that’s been grating against my skin like sandpaper all this time.
