“I noticed,” I say flatly, and move ahead.
I don't look at her. I haven't looked directly at her since we entered and I intend to maintain that until we're back outside and I can put sufficient distance between us to think straight again.
We move deeper into the building. The sound behaves strangely in here. Footsteps return slightly wrong, echoing off surfaces they shouldn't reach. Something groans above us, long and slow. Below, that dripping I heard from outside, patient and rhythmic, counting down to something.
The stairwell opens on my right. Descending.
I point two fingers down and take the stairs without waiting. Toren falls into step behind me and I am acutely, irritatingly aware of every single movement she makes in the dark. The way she breathes. The way she stays exactly one step behind me, not because I’m holding her but because she knows I won’t let anyone hurt her because she is mine to torment and kill. Only I get that satisfaction.
I hate her.
I hate a lot of things about her, and I am aware, something I refuse to examine, that the cunt has lived longer than I should have allowed.
The lower corridor stops me cold.
Clean. After all the rot upstairs, down here is clean. Bare concrete. Swept floors. Steel doors, modern, reinforced, each one with a frosted observation window and a slot at the bottom. I move to the nearest door and angle my torch through the glass.
Small room. Metal cot. Drain in the center of the floor.
A figure flinches from the light, arm thrown up over their face, body curling inward. It’s the automatic brace of someone who has learned that whatever comes through that window is rarely good.
I pull back.
I stand still. I breathe as I press down everything that threatens to surface. I’m a sick son of a bitch and live to torture those who deserve it but this… This isn’t something even I could do to innocent fucking kids. The one in this room can’t be much older than puberty age.
Then Toren is beside me.
Not at my shoulder this time. Beside me, close enough that her arm nearly touches mine, and she looks through the same window and goes very, very quiet. I make the mistake of glancing at her.
Her jaw is tight. Her eyes are bright in the torchlight, not with tears, but with something raw and furious and deeply, privately felt. She stares through that frosted glass and I watch something move across her face that she doesn't bother to hide, because she never bothers to hide anything, and that has always been the most disarming thing about her.
She feels everything loudly.
I look away first.
“Sixteen doors,” I say quietly. “Maybe more further in.”
She's silent for a moment. Then, “Twenty-two doors.”
It isn't a question. It isn't a statement.
“We get all of them,” she says. I move forward ignoring her like she didn’t just speak.
She falls into step beside me, not behind me this time. Beside me. Level with me, her shoulder almost brushing mine, and she doesn't say a word.
I raise my weapon and move deeper into Walter House. I don't look at her and I don't think about her, I focus entirely and completely on the mission.
And I am only partially successful.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TOREN
When I was first here I was never shown this side. I was on the top level where everything seems much calmer, brighter and liveable. The second level is where I was sent when Kellan brought me here. This is where the ones who need to be punished are sent. This is the area my father uses to break the innocent children of men and women who refuse to bow to him and his demands.
I stop outside room twenty-one and gaze through the window. Anger slams into me as I recall being locked in there for weeks. I quit following Xaden and make my way in the opposite direction and head upstairs. I need to see it. I have to. I need to know it was real, that not everything that happened in here was a figment of my mind playing tricks on me.
“Tor.” I hear my name being called by Carnage but don’t stop. I keep going up. I’m being driven by primal need now. I feel like I can’t pull in a breath, my panic is rising and I can’t stop it.
