Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 88673 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88673 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Immediately, she’s recoiling from me. I want to laugh, but I don’t want her to hear, so I settle for a smile. “What do ya say? Deal?”
Her words come out as a growl. “No deal.”
“Great, then let’s go.” I spy the belt I’ve been using to bind her hands and reach down and grab it. Then I drag her back to the trapdoor and put her right in front of it, her bloody feet perched on the edge. I lean in to her ear as I bind her wrists back up, making it as tight as possible. “Even though you don’t deserve it, I’ll leave the gag out. But if I hear one fucking peep out of you, Clover, I’ll make good on one of those threats of mine that you’re so worried about. Now get down there.”
She wants to talk back. Badly, I can tell. But she holds it all in and lowers herself down to a sitting position. Then she scoots her way down the stairs. I don’t even wait until she’s all the way down, I just close the trapdoor and let out a breath.
Fucking woman. I know what she’s doing with all that polite conversation she was trying to have with me. She’s trying to make me see her as a person instead of an obstacle in the way of reaching my goals.
But it’s not gonna work.
Once I leave the library I go back to the kitchen and resume eating. But the chicken and noodles are cold now, and taste like shit, and I don’t like sweets, so I have no inclination to eat the applesauce or candy.
So my meal—the only meal I have left—ends up being unsatisfying and not nearly enough.
Why couldn’t she just shut up and sit here? Why is that too much to ask?
It’s like she wants me to kill her. Like she’s trying to get on my nerves. And that remark about the darkness? Did I mention that I was in the tunnels? I don’t think so. All I said was that I didn’t want to get sent back down there.
And she knew that ‘there’ was a dark place.
She’s smarter than she lets on. Which is very bad for her. Because if she would just play dumb, I might be able to talk myself into believing it.
She saw me again too. And I let her.
I let out a long breath and shake my head.
This is not going to end well.
But then I remember what she said about the bedroom on the fourth floor and I go up the stairs, all the way up to the third floor, and I start opening doors, looking for the secret entrance to the room with a bed.
A bed.
Something I haven’t had the pleasure of sleeping in for a long time now. Before this job, I spent a few days in a holding cell on the main level of the city. But there was no bed. Not a proper one. Just a cement cot attached to the wall by steel brackets. It didn’t have a mattress on it.
Prisoners where I come from don’t get anything but hard labor, and darkness, and hunger, and cold.
There’s no door on the third floor that leads to the top of the house. Not even one of those attic access ones in the ceilings. So I go down a floor and sure enough, I find a stairway in the back bedroom. Two flights later I come to another door, which does, in fact, have an old-timey lock with a skeleton key sticking out of it.
I open the door and find the light switch, flicking it on.
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it. And I’m smiling too, because this is the most ridiculous princess room I’ve ever seen. Actually, it’s the only one I’ve ever seen but that doesn’t make it any less absurd.
There are unicorns everywhere. The walls are pink, the curtains are yellow, and the bed is a canopy, of course. Something a six-year-old up-topper would sleep in. No self-respecting Colony kid would be caught dead sleeping in a bed like that. Not even a girl.
But… I have to admit, it does look pretty comfy. I walk over to it and sit down.
It’s a mistake. Because this mattress is so fuckin’ soft, there’s no way I can’t slump backwards into the pillows.
The next thing I know, I’m sound asleep.
I wake up with a jolt, sitting straight up. For a moment, I’m not sure where I am. But a gorgeous sunrise greets me from the other side of the dormer windows.
A smile creeps past my lips as I remember what this room is.
Her room.
All the furniture is white, all the walls are covered in pictures and posters, and there is a whole wall of shelves displaying trophies and ribbons.