Those cheekbones! I heard you have a twin, such a shame it’s a male. Males do not display well. There’s always issues with them.”
I look around, but there’s piles of crap around me that don’t look helpful right now. A pile of blankets, a desk, some books… no speaker and the glass distorts the sound so I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.
The glass surrounds me on all sides.
“To think I almost lost you to the Crow. Atticus Crawford, the man who murdered my father. Paid a diamond to the Wolf to get rid of him. He couldn’t find my father’s place, you know? He couldn’t find it then and he won’t find my apartment either. I’ve been too careful. By the time the Wolf comes home, it’ll be too late for you. Everything happens for a reason, Avery Beaumont. You slipped away from my father then because you were always meant for me. The first of my own collection.”
Chapter Nineteen
The glass is all one sheet without any joins or weak spots. It’s thick enough that pounding on it with my fists makes no sound, an eerie thing to see in action. I can’t see how the hell it opens and closes, only the noises I’d heard as he put me in here as clues. There’s no hatch for food and only a bucket in the corner that I’m assuming I’m supposed to pee in, but I’d rather die.
I would rather die.
I stand there and wait for the man to come back and do something but time crawls past me with nothing. The space I’m in is filled with items, and there’s a small wooden chair and desk pushed up to one side. I pull the chair out to look around the room beyond the glass.
This isn’t the only glass enclosure but none of the others have prisoners or items in them. One of them on the far side is open, but it’s too far away to make out any clues on how to get them open.
I’d never thought to ask Lips how she’d done it.
I start to look through all of the items, just in case there’s something that might be a help to me. There’s no bed, only a pile of blankets and pillows in one corner that smell musty and old. I would be forced to peel my own skin from my body if I touched any of them, so beyond poking at them with the toe of my shoe, I forget about them entirely.
There is a collection of books. None of them are hiding a weapon or key in them, and they all look as though they were borrowed from a library in the ‘80s and never returned. There’s a candle, a bowl, some little china figurines, and a bottle of water.
I’d kill for some water, but I’m not ingesting a goddamn thing in here.
The bucket is haunting me from the corner.
The more I look, the less I find and when I’m flipping through the books for the third time, the panic finally consumes me. My breathing speeds up until I’m gasping for air and still getting none. My heart feels as though it’s about to burst in my chest and my vision starts to white out around the edges.
It’s a full-blown anxiety attack.
I can’t pass out here, what if the man is watching me? What if he comes back in here after I’m out and touches me? There are too many bad options here.
Months ago while I was feeling particularly terrible about myself and how I’d handled everything that had happened in the Jackal’s lair, I’d asked Lips about it.
About the secret to surviving everything.
“How do you get through it? How do you work through something that painful? When the Jackal cut up my feet I—Lips, I thought I was going to pass out dead on the ground.”
She had smiled at me sadly, looking uncomfortable to be talking about her trauma but always open and honest with me when I needed it. “You have to find something you can really focus on. It has to be something that isn’t an easy thing or something that doesn’t mean shit. It’s like… so Illi once told me he goes through the correct way to butcher a pig. The whole process from slaughter to plate. I count down from a hundred in French, because numbers were always the hardest part of the language for me. It has to be something you know but that is complicated enough