Page 50 of The Cannibal

Her eyes opened, wildly furious with me, of course.

“I’m going to show you something,” I said slowly. “Do not bite me when I let you go.” I jolted her head again slightly. “Alina.”

“I won’t!” she finally hissed, a small chitter at the back of her throat.

I released her with palms facing out, satisfied with the established rules.

If I was to fix her, I needed her full cooperation. It seemed she was at the end of her patience, with me and with her situation. Which meant we can only go up from here.

“I’m not going in a closet,” she stressed.

“It isn’t a closet.” I fumbled with the keys, trying each one. The room had never been used, not yet. Phoebe still refused me a master key—she had the only one. I may have been offended if she hadn’t also refused Silas a copy. But it only made sense with how often Silas and I had been traveling. We could at least trust her with that.

Finally, a tiny key fit, and the lock clicked.

I see why she believed I was opening a closet. It was a tall, skinny door. Compared to the double doors of the bedrooms and the parlors, it did seem that way.

The room was in the interior, so there wasn’t much to be done about the stuffiness. A circular skylight was the only source of natural light. It was equipped with gas lamps on the walls to make up for it.

The room wasn’t a ballroom, not even big enough for a bedroom, but that was mainly due to the space the cabinets took up.

All the walls were covered in apothecary drawers and cabinets, with a large workbench in the middle with storage beneath. The walls were dark green, the cabinets a dark wood. I would have let her stock it herself, but Silas needed something to do while he waited for her to wake. Most of his distraction projects were simply making this place a home for her, somewhere that she felt she didn’t have to run from.

Dried plants hung from the ceiling. The smells were overwhelming, but at least they were pleasant.

Alina exhaled, her eyes searching the scene as if to make sure she was seeing it correctly. Her slender fingers brushed against the table as she walked by, her head craning up to the point I thought maybe she would strain.

I leaned against a cabinet, just watching.

It reminded me of where we started. The days in the college lab, fiddling away with her instruments. A small part of me felt bad about sabotaging her experiments with the help of the professor. Hard work is often thankless, especially in the world of science. Except now she was even more of a job than she was before.

She was lucky I was privy to the third-party interests, aside from poisonings. All I knew at the time was that Levi has had his eye on her for a long time, ever since he began employing her father. Things could have gone very differently if Silas hadn’t come back to London. Purely by chance too. Some pieces just fall into place like that. Never could I have predicted that it would land me on the opposite side I’d started on.

Alina opened the drawers, already taking mental inventory of all her new toys.

“Is this all mine?” She didn’t break eye contact with the items of the drawers, still filing her way through.

“Did you think he would build an entire homestead and forget your favorite room?” I teased.

She lifted a shoulder before it fell again.

“Don’t be dull,” I laughed, “you know him.”

“You never know.” She threw a glare over her shoulder. “I could ask for a ring, and he’d bring me one with someone’s hand still attached—oh wait, that was a different man who I didn’t know quite so well,” she finished, with the most barbed smile I’d ever seen. Cheeky.

“It was a good touch, wasn’t it?” I smirked.

“No.”

“They were from the hospital, anyway.” I shrugged.

“You stole the rings?”

“No! Of course not!” I shook my head. “I stole the arms.”

She didn’t find it as amusing as I thought she would.

“Well,” I glanced at her finger, the shimmer of gold flashing even in such dim light, “I suppose yours didn’t come with a hand attached?”