Page 166 of Somno Slave

I let my eyes drop to the page. I need one second where I am not looking directly at him.

“Why are you talking now?” I manage.

He doesn’t answer straight away.

My pulse starts again, hard and stupid. I hate that he can probably see it in my throat.

“Why not now?”

It settles badly.

I keep my expression flat. “You were silent for months.”

“Yes.”

“You refused every interview.”

The room feels smaller. I glance down at my notes again, but the words are useless now, just shapes pretending to be useful.

I swallow once. “Then why me?”

The second the words are in the air, I want them back. They sound cheap, desperate, and something ugly within me knows I don’t want him to say the answer out loud. Not in front of Peter. Not in front of the others.

Silence folds over the room. He looks at me for so long my skin starts to feel wrong, too tight over my bones.

When he finally moves, it is slow. He leans forward until the chain between his wrists pulls taut with a quiet metallic strain, until he is close enough that I can see the tiny scar cutting through his eyebrow, the shadow of stubble at his jaw, the mouth I know better in the dark than I should.

“Because” he says, “the others ask questions they already know the answers to.”

My breath catches, small and stupid.

“But you...” He pauses there, and I swear he can hear my heart trying to break through my ribs. “You ask the ones you feel in your body first.”

The words land like fingers under my chin.

My face burns.

“You don’t know me.” I rush. “You can’t know that.”

“No,” he says softly. “You’re right. I don’t know you.”

He’s lying. His eyes give him away first—too bright, too steady, that awful flicker of amusement sitting in them like he’s watching me trip over something he placed there himself. The corner of his mouth shifts, not quite a smile, just enough to tell me he knows exactly what he’s doing.

He makes no attempt to hide it.

That is somehow worse.

I should redirect. I should drag this back to something clinical, something I can defend in the debrief later. I should remember there are men watching me, and every second of this being logged and replayed and turned into evidence.

I should end it here.

Instead, I sit there with my mouth dry and my pulse beating so hard it feels lodged in my teeth, while a man in chains looks at me like he has already had access to parts of me I haven’t admitted exist.

My hand drops to the file in front of me, fingers pressing too hard against the paper. I look down.

Homicide.

The word hits like cold water.