Dusk (Dangerous Web #1) - Aleatha Romig Page 0,37

hope I believe you, or you too will be deemed useless.”

“Fine, new question,” I said, sitting taller. “Who do you work for?”

“Aww, there we go. You are thinking beyond your friend.”

I tried to concentrate on the here and now, not focusing on Araneae or where she could be. My energy was best spent not worrying about her baby or their future. Only for a moment, I imagined her back with Sparrow. I wanted that as much as I wanted to be back with Reid. I couldn’t help that I loved my friends as if they were family. I did.

The possibility of Sparrow without Araneae was as painful as Reid without me.

We’d all worked too hard and too long to forge whatever it was we all shared. I wasn’t willing to give up hope of us having it again.

The woman turned to the man.

I steeled myself, waiting for his abuse. Instead, he reached for one of the three chairs still at the table and carried it to the space before me. With the grace of a choreographed script, he turned off the bright light, leaving me with circles dancing in my vision. Then, he set the chair down and the woman stepped forward and took a seat.

It was as she sat that I noticed her left arm and hand. She was wearing a glove. It wasn’t a medical glove as if to protect her from illness or germs that my bodily fluids could but didn’t possess. The glove was white, much like gloves Michael Jackson or the Queen of England wore or maybe women in the mid-twentieth century with large hats as they went to church or perhaps the Kentucky Derby.

This wasn’t Kentucky, to my knowledge, and we sure as hell weren’t at church. I was fairly certain if we were on a spiritual precipice, this was the gateway to hell.

As the woman sat, she crossed her legs at her ankles. Her left hand gently fell to her lap. With her right unpocked—unscarred—hand, she tapped her chin. “Now, where to begin?”

I pulled at the restraints on my wrists, those binding me to the chair. “How about we start with untying me?”

She shook her head as her lips pursed. “No, that isn’t where I was thinking.” She tilted her head one way and the other, taking me in, searching my expression, perhaps my presence. “I know, Lorna. Start at the beginning.”

My head bobbed as I tried to make sense of this. “Could I have some water?”

The woman’s chin lifted abruptly.

The man behind her turned and stepped away. Opening the one door to the room, he left. In that brief second, I saw and heard nothing. There were no other people in the hallway. I couldn’t even be sure if the walls were different than these. It was just more space.

Where are we?

It was then I recalled falling asleep with Araneae. “Was the water in the bottles drugged?”

“If I told you no...?” the woman asked.

I didn’t answer. She was right again. I wasn’t likely to believe anything this woman had to say.

I could ask if the bottle that I hoped was about to come to me was safe or I could refuse to drink it. Again, I wasn’t certain I would believe anything these people said. I knew what I did believe: even without the earlier smoldering heat of the light, my thirst was growing by the moment, as was, unbelievably, my hunger.

I had no way of knowing how much time had passed since our last meal.

How was I moved from the cell to this room without my knowledge?

It reminded me of a baby, one that fell asleep at Grandma’s only to awaken at home. Yet I didn’t have the sense of trust and safety that was innate in a baby. Thirty-five years had whittled that away, leaving a select few as those who deserved my blind allegiance.

How long had it been since Araneae and I were taken?

How long since I’d seen Reid?

The questions flowed.

Instead of thinking about them or contemplating their answers and how they fit into the future as I’d know it, I stared at my captor.

This wasn’t like the books I’d read. Although I’d at one time considered myself Cinderella, I wasn’t Belle in a grown-up version of Beauty and the Beast. There was no redemption or future love story to be written in this current scenario. This wasn’t a fictional trope. This was the dangerous reality of the life I’d accepted, and my captor was an evil woman with