Chews.
Takes a piece of bread.
A sip from the cup.
Slow and deliberate about all of it, watching me the whole time I watch him with my hunger barely staying behind my teeth where I’m trying to keep it.
When he pushes the tray toward me this time I lunge forward before I can stop myself and then stop hard because the ties are still on and I’ve reached the end of them, straining toward the plate like a dog at a leash, and the humiliation of it is extraordinary.
I look at him pointedly.
He’s already moving toward me. “I’m going to untie you,” he says, crouching down to the ties, “and you should know just how unwise it would be to try anything stupid right now.”
I slump back in the chair. “I don’t even have the strength.”
The ties come off and I pull the tray close and eat. I find myself wondering why it’s so easy to talk to this man.
He’s one of them, he’s in this compound, he brought food to a prisoner in a cell, and yet there’s nothing in his manner that makes me want to bare my teeth.
I eat and he settles onto the floor with his back against the wall, legs stretched out, like we’re somewhere completely ordinary.
After the third bite he puts a hand on the edge of the tray.
“Slower,” he says. “You’ll choke yourself to death.”
“I would rather die from food,” I say, around a mouthful, “than have that bastard kill me.”
“That bastard?” he repeats.
“The one with the tattoo,” I say. “The serpent.”
“Razvan.”
The name lands in the room and sticks. Razvan. I turn it over in my mind without stopping eating.
It has weight to it, that name. Sharp at the start and then it drops. Like something being thrown.
“Razvan,” I say.
The man across from me, who has taken a seat on the floor with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out like we’re having a picnic, nods. He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “His father died.”
I stop chewing.
Look at him.
“Three days ago,” he says, not looking at me, looking at some point on the wall. “He got the news the same night you ran.”
Something moves through me that I don’t have a clean name for. I chew. Swallow. Put my fork down for a second.
“Well,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect. “He’s welcome to the club. My father is dead too. But you don’t see me kidnapping people and threatening to kill them over it.”
He tilts his head at me. Considering. “You did threaten to kill someone over it, actually.”
I pick my fork back up and glare at him. He accepts the glare without flinching and says nothing further, and I keep eating.
He passes me the water when I reach for it and doesn’t make me ask. He’s so easy in this space, so unbothered and almost gentle, that it keeps snagging my attention between bites. I don’tunderstand it. I don’t understand him in this place full of people whose faces do nothing.
“Why are you being kind to me?” The question comes out before I decide to ask it. It sounds more like an accusation than a question, which might be accurate.
