Chapter 111

Malachi

I didn’t sleep.

I hadn’t expected to. I sat on the cot with my back against the cold stone and my wrists in my lap, and I listened to the lamp hiss at the end of the corridor, and I held my right hand very still, as if what had been on it could still be there.

It wasn’t. Salt dries. Skin forgets. By midnight there was nothing on my thumb but my own skin, and the raw red line where the silver had rubbed it.

The cell still smelled of her. Roses and bergamot, and under it the laundry soap of a house I had grown up in, and the clean, sharp ache of her crying. It would be gone by morning too. I sat in it while it lasted.

She hadn’t promised me. I had asked her to forget me, and she had looked at me with her face wet and her chin up, and she had said nothing at all.

I should have been angry. I found I wasn’t.

***

They came for me before dawn.

Two guards, the same two as yesterday. One of them was young enough that his ha