you sit down?” His eyes didn’t let me retreat. They were watching me and I felt almost as helpless as when Wolfe’s black eyes were on me. I felt myself lower into the seat opposite him and he stared back at me as I did. I had the nasty feeling I knew what was coming next, but like a scene in a horror movie you don’t want to watch but can’t look away from, I was stuck in place.
“I want to talk about the basement.” He was still watching me. I didn’t like it. I hated it. I despise feeling trapped, and trapped I was. I hoped this would be quick – I hoped it was already over, actually, that maybe he didn’t see as much as I thought he had, that he’d not bothered to report it to Ariadne or Old Man Winter, and definitely not Kurt.
“About the fight with Wolfe?” I tried to keep the hope out of my voice.
“You know that’s not what I mean. Before him. What I saw…” His voice trailed off.
I remained silent. In a failed effort to be casual, I focused really, really hard on my left middle fingernail and started counting backward from one hundred.
“Sienna?” He repeated my name twice more in a bid to get my attention.
“I don’t want to talk about this.” My voice was quiet, but firm. Maybe a hint of a crack.
“You need to talk to somebody about it.”
“No, I don’t.” I could feel myself get defensive, pissed. “I’m pretty much a full grown woman at this point, and I can make my own decisions about what I want to talk about and don’t, and this falls into the territory of ‘don’t’.”
“You were locked in a house for over ten years and you never escaped? With your mother gone to work all day, every day?” He shook his head. “I’ve been asking myself since we met how a mother could keep a kid in check that long, even if they were the most passive, easygoing person on the face of the planet—”
“I gather you’re saying I’m not—”
“—let alone a stubborn, willful child that probably resisted from day one, just bucking for freedom any which way she could—”
I pursed my lips. “You make me sound like a wild horse.”
“Let’s go with that analogy,” he said, nodding, which broke our eye contact. “How does someone domesticate a horse?”
“They break it,” I said with a hint of defiance. “Do I look broken to you?”
“Looks don’t mean a thing. She did break you, didn’t she?”
I blew air out my lips and stared out the window at the snowfall. “I broke rules all the time,” I said in a tone of forceful denial. “She wasn’t home during the day, and I could do anything I wanted—”
“Except leave the house.”
The wind outside kicked up and the snow started falling sideways. I hadn’t seen that before. “No, I didn’t leave the house, but I looked outside plenty of times.”
He leaned across the table, making a bid to recapture my attention from the snow drifts that I allowed to distract me. “When she caught you breaking the rules, how did she punish you?”
I was stronger than him – I could have knocked him out and broken through a window and been gone. Gone from the Directorate and gone from this state and gone from my sorry little example of a stunted life. Tomorrow I could be living somewhere else and no one would catch me.
It was funny, because the cafeteria was hundreds of feet long and hundreds of feet wide, and the nearest table was ten steps away, and yet I felt like I was trapped in an enclosed space; it was just like…
“Yeah.” My acknowledgment came out in a voice of surrender. “That was how.”
In the corner of our basement stands a box. Made of hardened steel plates an inch thick, welded together, it’s a little over six feet tall, about two feet wide and two feet deep, when it stands long-end up. It opens like a coffin, along the longest plane. There’s a sliding door on that side, about two inches tall and four inches wide, just enough to see out of – or into – the box. There are hinges on one side and a heavy locking peg on the other.
I knew when Zack saw it that he would figure it out. But it was worse when he opened it.
“She didn’t let you out to…do your business?”
I shook my head. But he already