Chapter Eight The Cell
Chapter Eight: The Cell
The soup is the kind my mother made when I was small.
Chicken broth with herbs, the kind that takes all day.
I hold the bowl and she leans against the pillow and takes each spoonful with the patience of a woman relearning how to want things.
The color is coming back to her face. Not all the way, but enough that when the light comes through the curtains at this angle, she looks something like herself.
Nessa appears in the doorway.
I read her face before she speaks. The compressed mouth. The eyes that are working very hard to look ordinary. I set the bowl down, tuck the blanket around my mother's feet, and step out.
"All three of them." Nessa pulls the door almost shut behind her, voice dropped to barely sound.
"Your father. Your stepmother. Lilian. The Alliance Tribunal took them in an hour ago. Full investigation. They pulled everything from the lab — the whole floor of it."
I let the smile come. It is the most unguarded thing I've felt in half a month. Light. Clean. Like setting down something heavy after carrying it for too long.
From the far end of the corridor, footsteps.
Gideon rounds the corner at speed, phone at his ear, his face a color I have never seen on it: white, and open in a way he never allows himself to be open in front of anyone.
"Lilian." His voice is cracked down the middle. "Breathe, just breathe — slow — I'm coming right now, I'll be there, don't be afraid—"
He passes me like I'm furniture.
His eyes are fixed on the end of the corridor, and then he's past, and then he's gone, and the space where he was is just space again.
I look at where he disappeared.
Next to me, Nessa makes a small sound, like she is swallowing something she would rather say.
"Start packing," I tell her. My voice is entirely even. "Once my father's situation is settled, we take my mother and we leave."
The clock reads past midnight.
I sit on the edge of the bed in my silk nightgown and the room is quiet and Gideon's side of the bed has not been slept in.
On the nightstand, there is a photograph of the two of us. Three months ago, approximately. Some official occasion, the kind we attended twelve of that season.
In it I am smiling, and so is he. The smiles are the right kind. The kind that read, at a distance, as a marriage.
I reach over and turn it face-down.
The sound it makes when it lands is small and definitive.
I turn off the lamp and lie down in the dark and close my eyes, and I sleep.
***
Cold is the first thing.
Cold, and damp, and the particular hard edge of a surface that was never designed for a person to be comfortable on. I sit up and the room spins in the specific way of drug residue.
I look down.
I am wearing Lilian's dress. White, long, the kind of dress she chooses because she knows what it communicates: fragile, soft, something that needs protecting.
The bars around me are silver.
I have seen silver bars before, in the older parts of the Alliance security facilities.
They use them when they need to make sure the occupant cannot shift or draw on their strength. Cannot be anything more than restrained. Each bar gives off a faint cold light that is not quite natural.
I sit on the iron bed and I let my mind do what it does.
It shouldn't be him. The thought arrives first, the way it always does. There's a reason. There has to be a reason. Someone else moved on this. Someone who wanted it to look like him.
I believe this for almost a full minute.
The footsteps come from the dark at the far side of the room.
Gideon stops on the other side of the bars. He is still wearing yesterday's clothes. The look on his face is the look of a man who knows exactly what he has done and has decided to call it something else.
The last of it dies.
He did this. The thought arrives without drama. He actually did this.
Every time I think I have found the bottom of what he is capable of, he finds another floor.
I find myself wanting to laugh. Not from humor. From the particular feeling of watching something prove, precisely and finally, what you already knew was true.
"Lilian is caught up in your father's case." He doesn't look at me directly.
"The investigation methods they use are too much for her. She couldn't survive them. She's not strong enough."
He adjusts his grip on the bar without seeming to notice he's touching silver.
"You look similar enough. Same build. If you take her place for a few days—"
"For a woman who rejected you." My voice comes out very level. "You're putting your Luna in a cell for a woman who rejected you."
He is quiet for a moment.
"She was forced to. Her father said she made the decision. But I know it was her father. " He says it simply, like a fact he has long since made peace with. "I don't blame her for it. Her health hasn't been right since."
A pause.
"There's nothing between us. Don't read into this." His jaw tightens. "I just can't watch her die."
He looks at me then. Just briefly.
"I swear to you. A few days. That's all I'm asking. I've already made arrangements. You won't be harmed. You won't be made to suffer."
I look at him.
He cannot hold it and glances away.
A few days. He has put me in a silver cell and arranged, on my behalf, for me not to suffer. The thoughtfulness of it. The profound, breathtaking thoughtfulness of it.
I stand up.
I walk to the bars and I look at him the way you look at something you have finished having feelings about.
"The Chief Adjudicator is overseeing this case personally." My voice sounds like mine from the outside. From the inside, there is nothing attached to it.
"You may recall — I mentioned, some time ago, that he and I have a history. That I was the one who drove him out of my father's pack."
Gideon goes still.
Then he lifts his eyes to mine and I watch him talk himself out of it. Watch him decide I am overstating. Watch him choose, in real time, to believe the thing that is easier.
"I'll come for you." His hand closes around the silver bar. Where it touches, the skin is already reddening, and he doesn't move his hand. He wants me to see this. He wants the cost visible.
"I swear to you. This is the last time anything like this happens. When it's done, we go somewhere. The coast, like you wanted. Your mother comes. All of it. We start again."
He waits.
I turn around.
I walk back to the iron bed and I sit down and I face the wall.
I do not say anything. I do not intend to say anything. There is nothing behind me that requires a response.
I wait for the feeling that should come. The part of a mate bond that aches. The animal's protest. The instinct that has no patience for the things the mind has already decided.
I wait for my inner wolf to surface with some counter-argument my rational mind can't override.
There is nothing. No pull. No ache. The bond is there the way a scar is there. Present. Visible. But no longer connected to anything that feels.
He stands outside the bars for a long time.
I hear his breathing even out and then stop evening out and then the footsteps, and the footsteps move away, and the room takes back its silence.
I sit in the silver dark and I do not cry and I do not rage and I do not plan.
Not yet.
For now I only sit, and the cold comes up through the iron, and the bars put their faint light on everything, and I am completely, finally, all the way done.