Page 48 of Bought for Blood

Out of the frying pan…

I don’t let myself finish it.

I wash and dress while she strips the bed around me. The dress fits. The shoes are the strangest part. A year barefoot, and now there’s leather holding my feet in a shape they’ve forgotten. I stand in them, working my toes while Mrs. Brown folds linen with her back to me.

I take the two wool blankets off the chair and hold them out. “The dragon in cell seven. Take these down to her. She runs hot; she won’t need them for warmth, but she can sit on something soft for once. Nobody has to know where they came from.”

Mrs. Brown looks at the blankets, then at me. Something blank and unimpressed settles over her face.

“Blankets are house property.” She takes them out of my arms and lays them on the stripped mattress. “So was your friend, last I checked. You’ve been sold, and she hasn’t. My advice is to stop collecting things you can’t keep. It makes the moves easier.” She checks her watch. “Downstairs by noon.”

“Mrs. Brown…”

She stops, not quite turning back.

“My sister. Grace…”

“Is the least of your worries right now,” she says. “But I hope, wherever she is, she’s learned the same lesson.”

She’s gone before I can ask more.

I stand in the middle of a room that was mine for eleven days, in shoes, holding nothing at all.

The butter knife is on the nightstand. I slide it into the waistband of the dress, against my hip, and it’s cold through the cotton for the first minute.

Sold for a fortune, delivered in a borrowed dress, total worldly assets: one piece of stolen cutlery. My family would be proud.

They walk me down through the lobby at noon. Two guards, both keeping the careful distance that follows me everywhere since the night he saw the mark on my neck. A clipboard gets signed at the desk. Someone says “transfer complete” into a phone. Freight moves through this building all day; today the freight has shoes on.

Then the doors open, and I stop walking.

Sun.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper.

Full sun, straight down a cold blue sky, hitting me across the face. A year of tube lights and one dark window, and now there’s real light lying warm on my cheeks, my eyelids, the backs of my hands. My eyes flood and spill over. My wolf turns her face up inside me and stands there drinking it.

“Keep moving,” a guard says.

“You’ll wait.” I say it with my face tipped up, and I take three more seconds of it, because I’ve just learned what I cost and it was enough to buy me three seconds.

They wait.

Mrs. Brown comes out. “Well, look at you,” she says. “Almost human.” She laughs, but it’s not warm. “Let me get a photo for my scrapbook.”

“Your what?” I turn to her just as she takes the photo with her phone.

“That will be all.” She’s already walking away. I blink and shake my head.

There’s a car waiting. It’s long and black with the rear windows tinted, engine running, heat rolling out when the door opens. Nobody cuffs my hands. Nobody sits beside me. A man is in the front behind a pane of glass.

I’m alone in the back with leather seats, a folded rug, a bottle of water in a little door pocket. I sit there while we drive away, leaving the nightmare behind us.

A nightmare that Kalli still lives in.

I never said goodbye. Or maybe I did and didn’t know it was the last one. That’s how it always goes here. A wall goes quiet. Nobody tells the person on the other side of it anything at all.

She kept me a person when the ward was doing everything it could to make me a number instead. I paid her back with two blankets she’ll never get, and a message I can’t confirm was ever delivered.