I don’t react.
He looks at me again, searching my face for something—hesitation, doubt, humanity.
“What happens?” His breathing changes. Shallower. Faster. “If he doesn’t pay?”
There it is.
The question he didn’t budget for.
I hold his gaze.
“You’re out of questions for the rest of the night.”
His mouth falls open. “Oh, come on. You can’t just—” His nostrils flare. “That’s like telling someone there’s a shark in the water and then refusing to clarify if it’s hungry.”
“Careful.”
He cuts himself off, his jaw clamping shut and his chest rising and falling hard. He’s holding onto his shield of humor as tightly as he can, but it’s fraying around the edges.
For a second, I consider telling him. Not because he deserves it or because it would help, but because I want to see what he’d do with the truth.
Instead, I stand. I unlock the cuff from the pipe and pull him to his feet. He resists just enough to make a point, not enough to make it a fight.
“You won’t kill me,” he says as I guide him back toward his room. It sounds like a challenge wrapped around a plea. “You like me, and you know it.”
The corner of my mouth twitches despite myself. “You’re tolerable.”
“Wow. Be still my heart.”
We reach his room, and I remove the cuff from his wrist.
“Just wait,” he says, his voice sharp but shaking just slightly underneath. “When I get out of here, I’m going to be so annoying. Like, aggressively annoying. I’ll hunt you down and won’t ever leave you alone. You’ll regret not killing me.”
That almost makes me smile.
“Inside, Cason.”
His jaw tightens at the name, but he doesn’t try to correct me.
This time when the door shuts, he doesn’t look at me.
And for reasons I don’t examine too closely, that bothers me more than his anger did.
It’s been a fewdays since I asked questions that I really didn’t like the answers to. When he let me out the next day—he’s been letting me out for a few hours every day, which still surprises me—I changed tactics.
If the answers about my fate were going to be vague and terrifying, then I’d stop asking about my future.
I started asking abouthiminstead.
At first, it was purely strategic. Information is power. People give things away when they don’t realize they’re being studied.
Where did you grow up?
Do you have siblings?
Did you always want to be a kidnapper, or was that a career pivot?
He reserved his right to not answer many of my questions, or he gave me answers that were technically answers but told me nothing. The kind of responses that could apply to a hundred different lives. Which, if he’s some kind of hired mercenary, might mean he has a stockpile of generic answers from differentidentities.
