Page 35 of Bought for Blood

“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.