CHAPTER 11: THE LONGEST HOURS

I laid on my back on the narrow mattress, staring up at the stained ceiling tiles while my eyes burn from sheer exhaustion. A faint, dry scratch comes from somewhere above my head, rattling through the lath and plaster. I sit bolt upright, my muscles tensing for a fight. It is only a rat, or the metal of the old gravity pipes expanding in the damp basement chill. I lie back down, and my hand flies automatically to my throat, pressing flat against the pulse there.

Still dark. Still dark.

I turn onto my right side, the thin wool blanket scratching against my bare skin. The silence in the basement is absolute, heavy and suffocating. I turn back onto my left side, then onto my stomach, burying my face in the lumpy pillow before giving up entirely with a soft, frustrated sigh. I press the heel of my hand hard to my chest, then over my mouth to muffle my shallow breathing. My fingers drift to the edge of the cheap cotton blanket, picking mindlessly at the fraying hem until a long, grey thread comes loose in my grip.

Every time a timber shifts in the manor above me, I sit up, listening to the metallic clank of the pipes, before letting myself fall back against the mattress. I check the corner of the heavy curtain where a sliver of the outside world meets the window, straining my eyes for any hint of grey light. I count the minutes in my head, dragging them out one by one, watching the slow crawl toward sunrise. I touch my neck again, feeling the raw, sensitive skin where the cold air stings, and pull my hand away as if I've been burned. I reach down, fold the oversized white shirt neatly, unfold it with shaking fingers, and finally hide it deep under the mattress out of sight.

What do elders even do? the thought claws at the inside of my skull. Look at me? Touch me? Ask me things I can't answer?

They will see the shirt hidden in the linens. They will smell him on my skin.

"I didn't do anything," I whisper into the dark room, the words thin and fragile. "I didn't do anything."

Say it enough times and it starts to sound like a lie.

The shirt is tucked away, but the sharp, pine-and-smoke trace of the stranger still clings stubbornly to my skin. My thoughts drift away from the coming dawn and pull me back to him.

Gold eyes.

Grown wolves, heavily armed pack guards who treat the rest of us like dirt, and they couldn't get out of that room fast enough. All over a glimpse of ink. What was it about that majestic black wolf and the crowned crest on his back that made them turn tail and sprint? I remember the cold, clipped way he spoke to me.

"Do I look short-staffed?"

"It depends on my mood."

He didn't say no. He didn't say yes. He said mood. Does a man like that even keep promises to a stranger he found dripping wet on his floor?

I pull my knees up tightly to my chest, curling into a hard ball, and rock once, twice, before catching myself and forcing my limbs to go rigid. The most terrifying part isn't that he might turn me away or demand a harsh price for my life. It's that he helped me at no immediate cost. In my experience, kindness from strangers always carries a hidden blade.

The memory of his voice echoes down the dark hallway of my mind, drifting from the cracked door of his suite: "Victor's daughter. Everything on her. By morning."

At that, every drop of blood in my body goes completely still.

"What if I just traded one cage for another," I whisper into the quiet, the words tasting like ash. At least in Victor's house, I know the exact measure of the bars. At least I know how hard they bite.

A bitter, broken half-laugh escapes my throat. "Frying pan. Fire."

But the frying pan has been burning the flesh off my bones for fifteen agonizing years.

I reach up to brush my cheek, and it is only then that I realize I am crying, hot tracks of water sliding silently down my skin without me ever feeling them start.

A thin, ghostly line of pale light slides horizontally under the worn fabric of the curtain, slicing across the dusty floorboards. The distant, heavy thud of boots echoes down the stone stairs—slow, deliberate, and entirely unhurried. They reach the bottom of the landing, turn toward the corner, and stop dead outside my wooden door. A hard, final stop.