Masquerade (Knight & Daywalker #3)

Chapter 1

SOMEWHERE IN THE NORTH SEA

***

It was a good day, because I hadn’t had the urge to curl up and die even once.

That had become a standard over the years I’d been in the cell, especially during the weeks it took to recover from being drained. Being left with so little energy that eating was a near-impossible chore rather than the one good thing that happened to me in my prison, well . . .

Some days I didn’t bother.

Still, my body had stubbornly refused to just die, even if my willpower had given way years earlier. Was it years? Decades? Centuries?

I had no way of knowing how long it had been, truth told.

I wasn’t fed on any kind of real schedule, and even if I had been, there wasn’t a convenient notebook to write things down.

I could have scratched hash marks into the wall like some kind of prison stereotype, but it was hard to make a dent in the walls of my cell, and I didn’t have the extra energy for it.

Any and all energy I had went into weakening the back wall behind the pile of straw I slept on. I’d been working on it for . . . well, again, no idea. A long time, though.

Every time I could manage it, I grew a claw and scraped away at the mortar that held the wall together.

One of the stones was so loose I was certain I could shove it right out, but the unfortunate fact of being a full-grown man was that I was a bit bigger than the width of a single stone.

Even as pitiful and starved as I was after what was probably years of captivity, I wasn’t quite that small.

I had most of a second stone loosened as well, and when I finished with it, that might be enough room, since they were pretty sizable stones.

Three would be plenty for sure.

The only problem after that was that I had no idea what was on the other side of the wall. I thought it was an outside wall, because it was consistently the coldest one in my prison. I only kept sleeping there because the straw hid the progress I’d been making on getting out.

And while it was dangerous to make a hole in an outside wall, it seemed much less likely to be fruitless and result in immediate recapture.

Even if the other side was a five story drop, or went straight into the ocean—that I swore I occasionally heard past the stone and blood rushing in my own head—death was preferable to being held prisoner and drained of energy again and again.

At least then it would all be over, one way or the other.