Page 12 of The Witch They Crave

He's got his sleeves pushed to the elbow, hands loose between his knees, and that carefully arranged nothing on his face—the one I now can't stand to look at, because every line of it is a decision and I know exactly what the decisions are for.

Contain the asset. Keep the asset stable. Do not let the asset expire before the inquest can rule on it.

That’s all I am to him To all of them. An asset.

"I'm not doing a hunger strike," I tell him, because I can see him building the report in his head. "Put that in your little file. It's not a protest. I'm just not hungry."

"You're not sleeping either."

"I don't sleep well in refrigerators. Turns out."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth and is gone. He stays down on his heels where he is, level with me, under my eyeline, and I hate that too—the gentling of it, the way he makes himself smaller like he doesn’t want to spook me.

"Train with me," he says. “In the meantime.”

I laugh. It's ugly and there's nothing in it.

"You're going out of your mind down here," he says, even, reasonable, the voice that used to talk me off ledges before I knew he could be so duplicitous. "Fourteen days in a stone box with nothing to do but not eat and not sleep apparently. It will break you before the inquest ever gets the chance. So train. An hour. You set the terms, you call the stop, and it gives your head somewhere to go that isn't the back of that wall."

"No."

"Calypso—"

"I said no." I put my head back against the stone. "I'm not letting it out. Not down here, not for you, not for anything. You saw what happens. So no, I'm not going to stand up and play witches and warlocks for you so you can feel like you're managing me. It stays in. Where it can't reach anybody."

"That's not how it works and you know it. It doesn't stay in. It builds."

"Then it builds."

He goes quiet. The muscle in his jaw shifts a centimeter, and if I still let myself care about the geography of this man I'd know exactly what he was thinking.

He’s annoyed. He wants to grab me by the shoulders and force me out of this funk.

I don't give him an inch. I turn my face to the wall.

"There's food," he says finally, standing. "It'll be here when you want it."

"Don't hold your breath." Then, because I can't help it, because meanness is the only muscle I've got left that still works: "Oh. Sorry. You don't have to."

Aamon doesn't rise to it. Of course he doesn't. He leaves and pulls the door closed behind him.

∞∞∞

I don't mean to sleep.

That's the thing about the back wall—it's cruel enough that I thought it would keep me up. Stone doesn't care about you. It leaches the heat out of your spine and it doesn't soften and it doesn't hold you. Even though the cot is four feet away being soft in the dark, I won't touch it. The cot is a comfort and I don't get comforts, I get a wall, I get exactly as much as I gave that room full of people, which was nothing, which was worse than nothing.

So I sit against the wall to punish myself and my body betrays me anyway, the way it always does, and somewhere in the grey nothing my eyes close and don't open.

And then I'm back at the place I was avoiding like the plague. I’m back… at the Revel.

I know it's the dream because the edges are hazy but the emotions, the thickness of my fear feels just the same as the real thing. The chapel's gold with candlelight, the marigolds still whole on their ropes, the witchfire blue and floating, and Emric is in front of me in that jacket with the sugar still on the cuff from our date. He's saying my name. The way he said it at the end, warm, unafraid, tipping his head at me the way he did—

breathe, Calypso, you're okay, I've got you—

and I know what comes next but I still try to stop it. I throw my whole body against it but nothing changes, and the light comes up my arms white and wrong and I watch it reach him. I watch it go through him. His face doesn't even change. That's the part that chokes me. He looks at me like he's not afraid, like he trusts me, right up until there's nothing left to look at me with, right up until he's a grey drift coming apart in the air with my name still hanging where his mouth was—

I'm screaming before I'm awake.