Page 11 of The Witch They Crave

But nobody gets to make me pick up the cup or eat. That one's mine.

You need to drink something.

There he is. The warm thing behind my sternum, low and careful, the way it's been since they locked the door—rationed, quiet, like it's learned there are ears down here it didn't used to worry about. I scoff at the gentle, stupid warmth that rocks through me when I know he’s there.

"No," I say.

You've had nothing since—

"I said no. You don't get to do that anymore. You don't get to be reasonable in my head like you've got a right to be in here."

I've always been in here.

"That's the problem." My voice scrapes. It's the most I've spoken in hours and it comes out rusty. "A month. A whole month I told you things. Things I never said to Nellie. Things I never said out loud in my life. And you sat there and took every one of them and let me think you were—" I can't say his name. The room's cold enough without it. "You let me think you were somebody I really cared about."

I never told you who I was.

"You never told me who you weren't, either. You let me fill it in. That's the same as lying, wherever you learned to argue." I press the heel of my hand hard against my sternum, over the place it lives, like I could push it back down through my own ribs. "Get out."

You know I can't do that.

"Then be quiet. If you can't leave, be quiet. I don't want your voice, I don't want your advice, I don't want you telling me to drink water like you care whether I—" My throat closes on it. "You had a month of me. That's all you get. Now sit down in the dark and shut up, same as everything else they buried down here."

For a moment it doesn't answer, and I think maybe it will keep going, keep being warm and patient and worming, and I don't think I have it in me to fight it and the room and the grief all at once.

All right, it says. So gently it makes my eyes sting. All right, Calypso.

And then it's quiet.

I blow out a ragged breath and wrap my arms around my knees, tugging them closer.

The quiet stretches out. No trays, no footsteps, no warm voice worrying at me. Just the drip of water somewhere down the passage and the grey light that never changes and the fact of me, sitting on a stone floor in a cellar that used to hold blood, waiting for a countdown I can't see to run out. I try to do the math on the days and give up. I try not to picture the chapel and fail. I think about Nellie and whether they've told her where I am. I think about Emric’s face. I think, in the smallest, ugliest part of me, that the cellar has it right—that a thing like me belongs down here in the dark with the other things people are afraid of, and everyone up there is safer for the walls.

They are.

I’m in another prison cell. And it’s where I belong.

The council and I were both stupid for thinking I had a chance at a normal life.

My legs start to go numb so I hold them tighter and bury my head in my arms.

The door scrapes open.

Aamon’s out there most of the time—the little common room with the shelving and the drain. He stops in the doorway for a moment and just looks at me, folded into the corner where the two cold walls meet, and then he looks at the tray on the slate by the door with everything on it exactly where it was this morning.

He picks it up with a sigh.

He crosses the room and crouches, setting it down on the floor an arm's length from me. Close enough that I could reach it without moving anything but my hand if I wanted to. The bread. The wax carton. The cup with its skin of dust. Then he settles back on his heels, out of my space, and waits, like he's got all night, which he does.

Neither of us are going anywhere for fourteen days.

"You haven't eaten," he says again.

"You can see that."

"It’s been two days, Calypso."

"You can count too."