“A doctor. I didn’t want to leave my patients, and then I couldn’t leave,” Nick said, because it seemed to make sense. He rattled his cuffs again. “What did I do?”
Malloy considered that answer for a moment, his eyes narrowed, and then nodded toward the guards. They backed off to the door, and Malloy pulled a chair over to the edge of the bed to sit down. He crossed long legs.
“We found you in the snow outsides, naked and raving,” he said. “You mustn’t have been out there that long, though, because you seem… intact.”
The glance at Nick’s groin under the threadbare white sheet was obvious enough to make Nick’s ears hot. He shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t remember anything,” he said. “Where am I?”
The odd, lewd distraction in Malloy’s face snapped off as he pulled his “give nothing away” mask back on.
“Somewhere you shouldn’t be,” he said as he stood up. “But another doctor might be useful. We’ll discuss it. Get some rest, Nicholas. You’ll need it.”
There it was again, the flash of furtive lust that made Nick squirm uncomfortably. He wasn’t a prude—a loner but not a prude. People had found Nick attractive before, but they hadn’t looked at him like that. Malloy eyed Nick like he didn’t care if the interest was mutual, like maybe it would be better if it wasn’t.
“Could you?” He held his arm up.
A small smile folded Malloy’s mouth, and he licked the corner of his lips. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
Nick accepted that with a nod and lay back against the thin pillows. He let his eyes flutter closed and evened his breath out into the slow patterns of steady sleep despite the itch that intensified. Malloy didn’t move for a second, and then his hand touched Nick’s thigh, warm through the sheet. It took an effort of will not to twitch as his skin crawled and his balls tightened, but Nick managed it.
The hand slid higher, and then one of the guards shifted with a creak of leather and stiff canvas and cleared their throat. Malloy snatched his hand away.
“He seems harmless,” Malloy said, a thread of tension in his voice. “And he could be useful.”
One of the two soldiers spat. “We should have killed the bastard,” he said flatly. “He’s not supposed to be here, and we’re meant to let him eat our food? Breathe our air? Ewan should have left him in the snow. It would have been kinder. At least Big-Nose wouldn’t have seen it coming.”
“He can earn his keep,” Malloy said, his voice starchy.
Someone laughed crudely.
“Enough,” Malloy snapped. “We have other things to do. Tell Ewan that he found Nicholas here, so he can keep an eye on him.”
There was a grunt in answer. Nick listened as the door opened, feet scuffed over the floor, and it closed again. He waited for a moment and listened to the room. After a few years of working in a morgue, you learned what a room where no one else was breathing sounded like.
Once Nick was satisfied he was alone, he lifted his head and opened his eyes.
The room was silent. There was nothing pressed to the sliver of reflection in the metal-covered cupboards, no dry, dead eye that watched him through the crack under the door. When he rattled at the inside of his brain, nothing shed feathers or croaked laughter at him.
None of it had been real—to the monsters, not the Wild, and not even Gregor and his awkwardly sweet mouth. Or that’s what they wanted him to think.
Nick snorted to himself as he braced his feet against the mattress and pushed himself as far up the bed as he could with the cuffs limiting his movement. He sounded paranoid, Nick knew that, but his world had never been this normal….
Maybe he’d believe the Wild and the horror he’d not quite survived back in Girvan was the result of a break with reality, that the stress of that endless rote delivery of cold sad corpses had made his brain fold back into his memories of Gran’s old stories to make sense of it.
Nick could even doubt Gregor, although that one hurt like a knife in his gut. The idea that someone could love him when even his gran had struggled with it had always been hard to buy.
The monsters and the dead things had always been there, though. Dry, dead eyes that watched him through the crack in a cupboard door or things that scraped bone-fingers against the mirror in a dark room. Nick had learned to turn a blind eye to them, afraid that no matter how many times he told himself he wasn’t crazy, the evidence was right there. But when he looked, they were always there.
Even, Nick glanced from the cannula plugged into his arm to the IV stand, medication hadn’t ever shifted them before. The straps on the cuffs were too short to let him reach the needle, but he squirmed over onto one hip and caught the thin plastic tube between his teeth. A yank of his head ripped it out of his arm with a quick, dry flash of pain that should have been worse.
He left the IV to drip onto the floor and his arm to drip bright red blood on the sheets as he reached down over the side of the bed. The metal rim of the bed was cold under his fingers as he followed it along until he found where the strap was fastened.
Medical restraints weren’t prison shackles.
Nick caught his tongue between his lips as he twisted his hand around so he could pull at the buckle. The tendons in his wrist pulled tight as he fumbled at the rough leather, his little finger curled in a cramp, but he stuck to it. He finally worked his thumb into the loop and pulled it out. A tug unraveled the stiff leather from around the bed frame. It dangled limply from the cuff still around Nick’s wrist, and he twisted over onto his side to do the other hand.
They weren’t actually that hard to get out of if you weren’t panicked.
