hummingbird’s wings. It is forgotten a moment later as his eyes shut and he closes the distance between us.
His lips are gentle against mine, his hands less so as they roam across my back. My hands are equally hungry, flitting across the muscles of his arms, his shoulders. When I tighten my legs around his waist, his lips drop to my jaw, his teeth scrape my neck. I gasp when he tugs on my shirt to trace a torturously slow trail of heat down my bare shoulder.
“Keenan—” I breathe. The cold of the cellar is nothing against the fire between us. I pull his shirt off and drink in the sight of his skin, tawny in the lamplight. I trace a finger along the freckles that dust his shoulders, down the hard, precise muscles of his chest and stomach, before dropping to his hip. He catches my hand, his eyes searching my face.
“Laia.” The word changes utterly when he says it in that voice, no longer a name but a plea, a prayer. “If you want me to stop—”
If you want to keep your distance . . . if you want to remember your pain . . .
Keenan. Keenan. Keenan. My mind is filled with him. He has guided me, fought for me, stayed with me. And in doing so, his aloofness has given way to a potent, unspoken love I feel whenever he looks at me. I silence the voice within and take his hand. Every other thought grows distant as calm settles over me, a peace I haven’t felt in months. Without looking away from him, I guide his fingers to the buttons of my shirt, pulling open one, then another, leaning forward as I do so.
“No,” I whisper against his ear. “I don’t want you to stop.”
XXXVI: Elias
The unceasing whispers and moans from the cells around me burrow into my head like carnivorous worms. After only a few minutes in the interrogation block, I cannot remove my hands from my ears, and I consider ripping them off altogether.
Torchlight from the block’s hallway leaks in through three slits positioned high on the door. I have just enough light to see that the cold stone floor of my cell is bare of anything I could use to pick the locks on my manacles. I test the chains, hoping for a weak link. But they are Serric steel.
Ten hells. My seizures will begin anew in a half day at the most. When they do, my ability to think—to move—will be severely hindered.
A tortured keen sounds from one of the nearby cells, followed by the gibbering of some poor bastard who can barely form words.
At least I’ll put the Commandant’s interrogation training to use. Nice to know all that suffering at her hands wasn’t for nothing.
After a time, I hear scuffling at the door, and the lock turns. The Warden? I tense, but it is only the Scholar boy the Warden used as leverage. The child holds a cup of water in one hand and a bowl of hard bread and mold-encrusted jerky in the other. A patchy blanket hangs from his shoulder.
“Thank you.” I swig the water in one gulp. The boy stares at the floor as he sets the food and blanket down within my reach. He is limping—something he wasn’t doing before.
“Wait,” I call out. He stops but doesn’t look at me. “Did the Warden punish you more after . . .” After he used you to control me.
The Scholar might as well be a statue. He just stands there, like he’s waiting for me to say something that isn’t obvious.
Or maybe, I think, he’s waiting for me to stop blathering long enough to respond. Though I want to ask his name, I force myself not to speak. I count the seconds. Fifteen. Thirty. A minute passes.
“You’re not afraid,” he finally whispers. “Why aren’t you afraid?”
“Fear gives him power,” I say. “Like feeding oil to a lamp. It makes him burn brighter. It makes him strong.”
I wonder if Darin was afraid before he died. I only hope it was quick.
“He hurts me.” The boy’s knuckles are white as he digs his hands into his legs. I wince. I know well how the Warden hurts people—and how he hurts Scholars in particular. His experiments in pain are only part of it. Scholar children handle the lowest tasks in the prison: cleaning rooms and prisoners after torture sessions, burying bodies with their bare hands, emptying slop buckets. Most of the