Page 10 of The Witch They Crave

She's got her shoulder against the wall by the door, arms crossed, settled in like she plans to be here a while. "To get his things."

"His things."

"There's a room next to this one." She tips her head an inch toward the wall behind the cot, the one I share with whatever's on the other side. "Same as yours. He's down here now too." A beat, flat as slate. "You won’t have us breathing down your neck anymore."

So that's what fixed maximum distance means when you follow it down to the bottom of the stairs. Not eight feet across a training room with a standing training schedule. A wall. One wall, between Aamon’s cot and mine, for fourteen days or however long the council decides I get to keep being a menace to society.

I sit down on the ridiculous soft cot in the middle of the blood-store and I don't say anything else, because there isn't anything to say that captures the absolute punch sized hole in my chest or the exhaustion in my entire body.

“We’ll be hear until he returns. Then we will be stationed on either side of the watchtower as you exit. If you need us, send Aamon,” Corvin says.

I nod.

The centuries old steel door closes me in. The silence is so think my ears are ringing.

It all processes at once:

They didn't send me back to the facility.

I have another chance. Maybe my last one, though I don’t deserve it.

I hurt people. It’s what I do.

You're not going anywhere.

The voice echoes in my head from an hour ago. In my bedroom. Before Balcour ever knocked.

I lean forward, my head falling into my hands. Tears burn against my eyelids but I don’t dare let a tear sneak out.

"How did you know," I whisper below my breath.

And in the darkness under six hundred years of stone, in a room with only one way out and nobody in it but me, the warmth uncurls behind my sternum, slow and pleased, settling in like something that has finally, finally gotten me alone again.

My eyes open when I sense static in the air and the small bulbs along the ceiling dim and crackle almost imperceptibly.

Because I know them, it says. Better than you do. I've been listening to them a great deal longer.

"That's not an answer."

No. The word is almost fond. It isn't.

Chapter 3

I count the day in trays.

There have been two of them. Somebody brings them down and leaves them inside the door on the slate slab and takes the last one away untouched, and that's how I know a day has passed, because down here there's no morning. The slit of grating high in the wall lets in a grey nothing that never changes.

Could be dawn. Could be dusk. Could be the inside of my own skull.

The second tray is going the way of the first. Bread gone hard at the edges. A wax carton of something. A cup of water with a skin of dust on it now because I haven't moved it. I sit against the back wall of my little stone room with my knees up and I look at it and I feel my body ask for it, the low animal pull of a stomach that's been empty a day and change, and I tell my body no.

It's the only thing left I get to decide.

They chose the room. They chose the ward over the door and the wall at my back and the man on the other side of it. They chose fourteen days and the technology in my neck and whether I get to keep breathing air that isn't pumped through a vent.

Fine.

All of it, fine.