Page 133 of Bought for Blood

“Mrs. Brown. She supervised the ward. She said she wasn’t a messenger, but obviously she sent them. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.”

“Oh, she was bad all right. She used those messages to blackmail me. I’m not sorry about what happened to her.”

My eyes are wide. “What happened to her?”

Grace glances around. “Decker…” She stops. “Let’s just say she no longer has a place to put those reading glasses.” She lowers her voice. “His bear kind of…took her head off.”

I cough. I should be horrified. I am, in a way.

“Let’s not think about that now.” Grace squeezes my shoulder. “Let’s get a table.”

I stand at the end of the hall with a tray and stare around.

There’s a woman near the front with gray coming through at the roots and a plate of eggs she hasn’t started. She keeps looking at the door.

There’s a man about sixty at the end of a bench with a heavy winter coat on and both hands around a mug.

I know how it feels from the inside. The door you keep checking. The food you can’t start because nobody’s ordered you to. The cold that never leaves.

Then a boy two tables down looks up.

I stood behind him in a line at six in the morning while he asked a woman with a needle not to use his right arm. She used it anyway. I watched the red climb under his skin for days, and I never said one word to anybody about it. They wouldn’t have listened.

He’s across the gap between the tables before I’ve decided if I should greet him.

“Nineteen,” he says.

“Not anymore.”

“No. No, I know.” He stops a foot short with his good hand half up. He’s shorter than I remember. “They said you got out. Somebody said you got bought, and I thought that meant—”

“It didn’t.”

“No.” He swallows. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

I put the tray down on the end of the nearest table.

“What’s your name?” I say.

“Dougie…Douglas.”

“Douglas.” I stick my hand out, and he takes it with the wrong hand, and we make a mess of it. “How’s the arm?”

“Better. There’s a doctor here who says it’ll take a couple more weeks.” He’s gone red to the ears. “There’s a river. Did you know there’s a river? Out there.” He nods toward a window.

“I think I passed it.”

“I’m going to go down and look at it,” Douglas says. He’s been planning it. You can hear it.

I pick the tray back up and sit down across from him, and I eat a whole plate of eggs in a room where nobody is counting anything, and I try to get used to the noise.

Later we walk the top corridor, the one with the windows.

Real windows, six of them, cut through the rock face and looking down the mountain. There’s snow on everything and the road going down is a single black line with the trees crowded up to both sides of it.

Grace tells me the rest of it in pieces.

Viktor put Crowe in a room for two hours. Nobody knows what happened in there, and Crowe left straight afterward and hasn’t been back.