“Are we in danger?” My voice is hushed and tired.
Turning to the walnut wardrobe, he grips it with just one hand then easily drags it along the frilly rugs to stand flat against the door.
I spare the wardrobe an odd look before I realise, this isn’t a home we’ve taken shelter in.
It’s more like a waiting room than anything.
The stiff, chaise-style sofa that Mika’s been uncomfortably set down on, the polished Victorian fireplace, the wardrobe—for coats, I guess—and the overall hollowness of it.
Maybe it’s the tall windows or high ceilings, maybe it’s the hardwood floors covered in mismatched rugs, or the wooden steps that lead upstairs, or the modern crescent desk that sits against the other wall facing us, but there really is something about these old beautiful historical homes being turned into offices that just makes me feel so disappointed.
Samick tugs away from the wardrobe fitted against the door. “No.”
I throw a frown up at him. “What? I’m not doing anything.”
A blankness steals his face—that look I’ve seen on him so many times before. A wish for more patience. A tedium.
“No,” he echoes, firm. “We are not in danger. It is a precaution so we can sleep.”
“Oh.” I slide my gaze the wardrobe. The barricading. Then I hear it. ‘We’. I ask, “You and him?”
I tilt my head in the direction of the waiting room, right beside us.
Arwyn doesn’t pay us any attention, not as he brings an armful of medicinal salves and balms and powders to the stiff chaise.
A little jar of red catches my gaze, and I think of jam. Real, fresh jam, like my granny used to make, not the shit from the shop.
My mouth waters—and just as it does, my stomach syncs up with the sudden surge of hunger.
And it gurgles.
Samick brushes past me.
I hurry after him, over the narrow rug that passes the ugly glass desk, then down a hallway that would be claustrophobic if it wasn’t for the high ceiling.
“You slept at the prison,” I press, and that’s a point, I know it because he never sleeps, so that one sleep was like… his annual sleep or whatever.
But I’m pushing my luck. Asking too many questions, making too many comments.
Samick doesn’t cut me down for it. “Not enough.”
He moves down the corridor, unbothered, but darkness is inching back in as we leave behind the flames in the hearth.
I slide a hand down my wrist to the torchlight—and pause.
I wait for him to react.
Still, he’s unbothered, his steps moving patiently down the hallway.
I switch on the light.
We pass some open doors—doors that open to offices, gorgeous rooms turned corporate spaces.
Samick doesn’t stop to board up the windows in those rooms. He glances into each room that we pass, closes the door, then moves onwards to the next, then the next, until we’re at the end of the corridor.
The final door is wide open already.
And it opens to the kitchen.
