13. Chapter 13
Serenity
The guard who walks me out of the ward doesn’t touch me. A year of hands on my arms, and tonight he keeps his distance and holds doors open instead.
“Where are we going?”
“Up.”
“Up where?”
“You’ll see it when you’re in it.”
We go up two floors, past the level with the warm room, into a corridor with actual windows. Dark glass, wire in it, but windows. I count six of them. Then the guard stops at a door and knocks, and the door opens from the inside.
“Mrs. Brown?” I blink at the supervisor.
“Come in.” She stands aside to let me past. “Give her the key card and get out,” she tells the guard. “You’re tracking ward stink into my hallway.”
He hands me the card. Me. Then he’s gone. Mrs. Brown shuts the door, and I’m standing in a room I don’t understand.
A bed. A real bed, wide, with a white cover and two pillows. A lamp burning yellow on a table. A chair by the window, a radiator ticking under it, and the air is warm everywhere, all the way to the corners. There’s a rug. Through an open door I can see white tile and a bathtub.
A bathtub.
“Sit down before you go down,” Mrs. Brown says. “I don’t need you cracking your head on my floor. That’s trouble neither of us wants.”
“Whose room is this?”
“Yours, as of tonight.” She’s moving while she talks, turning down the cover, laying a towel over the chair.
“Bathroom’s through there. The hot water’s yours, no clock on it.
Food’s coming up. If anything’s wrong with the room, you tell me, and I’ll fix it.
I’d take that offer seriously. Everyone else in this building certainly is. ”
“Why?”
She looks at me then. A long look, over the glasses, top to bottom, and whatever she’s heard about tonight is sitting behind it.
“You know why,” she says. “Eat your supper. Sleep. There’s a bolt on your side of the door now; use it if it helps you settle. There’s a card reader on ours. That part I can’t fix, but he’ll have to be happy with it.”
A bed. A door they can lock from their side…but a bed.
“How… How long will I be here?”
She shrugs. “No idea. Be good, and maybe it’ll be forever.” She snorts.
“You mean I… I’m not going back? To the ward?”
“No.” She gathers her cardigan around her and heads to the door.
“Mrs. Brown.” It comes out before I’ve weighed it. “The ward. Cell seven. She won’t know where I went. People leave that ward one way, and she’ll think—”
“Not my concern.” She doesn’t turn around for it. Her hand’s already on the door.
“Please. Just tell her I wasn’t—”
“I don’t carry messages. Never have, never will, not for you and not for the next one.”
“But what about my sister?”
“That was different.”
“How?”
She stops with her hand on the frame, adjusting her reading glasses. “Bolt the door behind me.”
She goes.
The bolt is new brass, screwed on today. I slide it across, then back, then across again, just to feel it move under my own hand.
Then I stand in the middle of the rug with my arms around myself, and my wolf comes up slowly, and together we don’t believe any of it.
The bathroom first. I run the tap and hot water comes out of it. Actual steam. My throat closes so hard I have to breathe through my nose until it opens. I fill the tub too hot on purpose.
“Oh, God.” It scalds going in. I stay in it, right down to my chin, and my scars go pink under the water.
I wash my hair twice, slow, my fingers on my scalp, and somewhere in the second wash I realize I’m crying. No sound. Water into water. I let it happen. There’s nobody here to see it.
“You’re an idiot, Serenity.” The first privacy I’ve had in a year, and I spend it crying over shampoo.
My wolf stretches. All the way, nose to tail, a long shudder of a stretch, the first one in months. The cuffs hum against my wrists above the waterline, the runes doing their steady burn. Still there. Still on. But under them she has room now.
A knock at the door brings me straight up out of the water, and it runs off me onto the tiles.
“Hello?” I call out, scrambling from the tub to reach for a towel.
No answer. I wrap the towel around me and tiptoe to the door.
Footsteps recede down the hall outside. I slide the bolt, ease the door open, and look out.
A girl is disappearing down the corridor.
There’s a tray on the floor beside the doorway.
Stew, dark bread, butter. An apple, polished, red. I sit at the little table, take one spoonful of the stew, and stop.
Salt.
Somebody salted it. There’s real meat in it, and a green taste under the salt; thyme, maybe. My nose is waking up with the rest of me. My eyes sting again, over stew this time, which is embarrassing even alone.
Slow down. You’ll be sick.
I make myself go slow. Small spoonfuls. Butter on the bread, thick. I eat the apple down to the seeds.
When the tray’s empty, I turn the butter knife over once in my fingers—dull, cheap, but an edge is an edge—and slide it under the pillow before I can talk myself out of it. Nobody counts cutlery in a room like this. Not yet.
When it’s done, I sit with my hands on the warm table. The muscles let go all down my neck and out of my shoulders, one by one. Without my permission.
Because I know why this room is warm, and it isn’t kindness.
He’s a monster, Serenity.
I saw what he turned into. The predator I’ve been afraid to meet. I saw a picture rattle on the wall when Vasile hit it, and then a grown man ran.
But then he put his mouth on the bite on my neck, careful, slow, and closed it. And told me he was sorry.
Sorry.
“Vampires don’t apologize,” I say into the silence. There’s no version of what he is that says sorry to what I am.
But it looked real.
Stop. I push the tray back. Stop it right there.
Hoping is how you break in a place like this. I’ve watched it happen. The ones who hoped went the fastest.
He protected what he pays for. That’s all tonight proves. Every word of that speech was about his arrangement, not about me.
My wolf doesn’t respond to that. She’s watching the door, waiting on something I haven’t figured out yet.
I take the extra blanket off the chair and try the bed.
It’s too soft. I lie in the middle of it, clean and warm and fed, and my back keeps waiting for the cot’s crossbar. My ears keep reaching for sounds that aren’t here. It’s too quiet; a year of the ward’s hum and boots on concrete, twenty people breathing somewhere in the dark, and now nothing.
Finally, I give up, drag the pillow and both blankets to the floor, and lie down against the wall with my back to the plaster.
Better. That’s the shape my body knows. The wolf lies down along the inside of me, facing the door.
She isn’t afraid. She’s on watch, ears up. She can hold the watch all night now.
I reach for the glamour.
It answers. Steadier than it’s answered in a year.
I pull it over my hand, just my hand, and the shape goes vague against the blanket; there, but hard to focus on. Three breaths. Four. Five before it slips. A month ago, all I could manage was a flicker.
That’s the food. That’s the warmth, and the blood they’ve stopped taking. Whatever’s been sitting dormant in me is coming back now that nobody’s draining it off twice a day.
I lie on the floor of this warm room and feel it rise. I can’t tell if I’m steadied or scared. Both, probably.
Because it’s what he wants too. The stronger I get, the better I taste. I’d bet the apple core on it.
At least he—
I stop myself. At least he what? Feeds gentler than the last one? Pays for the stew?
Gratitude is your problem, Serenity.
He can have the blood, since I can’t stop him. He doesn’t get the rest.
The card reader clicks out in the corridor. A soft electronic sound, once. Locked from their side, midnight rounds. My bolt. Their lock.
My wolf keeps her eyes on the door. I pull the blankets up.
My fingers find my throat before I’ve decided to check it. Smooth. No mark, no ridge, nothing under my fingertips to prove any of it happened.
Two floors down, there’s a wall with nobody sitting against it.