Page 18 of The Wolf and the Monarch

“The butterfly on your hand.”

Sawyer’s gaze drifted down towards his hand for a moment then looked back to Andi. “It’s a monarch.”

He smirked. “Okay. What’s with the monarch?”

“Monarchs mean a lot of different things.”

“What’s it mean to you?”

Sawyer should have expected that question, yet it still caught him off guard. Out of all the people he had taken care of over the years, no one had really taken the time to attempt to talk to him. In fact, they all fucking hated him and they should. Andi should. The fact that he didn’t seem to was really quite perplexing. He popped the last grape into the man’s mouth and shrugged. “Hope, I guess.”

“For what?”

He couldn’t help but frown a bit. “For things to get better.”

Another soft smirk hit Andi’s lips. “Same.”

Sawyer just shook his head. It was really quite something that the man was able to still find a morsel of comedy in the situation he was in. Perhaps it would be the thing that kept him sane. Who knows.

He tossed the stem of the grapes over towards the bathroom area before he reached out and pulled up Andi’s shirt so he could check on his wounds. The bleeding seemed to have stopped on them, which was good. He pulled the gauze off each of them one by one and he couldn’t help but frown a bit at the sight of the deepest one. It looked agitated, to say the least. But he supposed it made sense after what Milo had done to it. “Does this hurt?”

Andi shrugged. “They all do.”

He supposed that was a valid response. “This one in particular,” he pointed at it. “Does it hurt worse than the others?”

“I’m going to be honest with you, I can’t tell. My whole body hurts.”

Sawyer sighed and nodded. “Okay.”

“Why do you care so much?”

“I told you, they want you alive.”

“Yes. They do. Why do you?”

The real answer was that he didn’t want to see another person die by the hands of his uncle and his cronies. He had seen it too many times and he hated that he could never do anything to help them besides the bare minimum. And there was a true possibility that Andi was going to suffer the same fate. But Sawyer was desperately hoping that he would tell them what they wanted so that they would let him go.

Probably.

Maybe.

Okay. It was unlikely. But maybe Sawyer could convince Milo. He didn’t ask his uncle for much and if Andi told them what he knew, they didn’t have to kill him. They could just make him promise he’d stay quiet about everyone at the bunker and he could be on his way. Sawyer just couldn’t stand any more blood on his hands. Even if Sawyer wasn’t the one who was actually killing them or hurting them, he let it happen. Every time. He wanted things to be different.

But he couldn’t tell Andi that.

It felt like too much.

So Sawyer just shrugged while he dropped his shirt back down.

The rest of the morning and well into the afternoon was pretty quiet between them. Even as Sawyer helped Andi with the bathroom situation. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable quiet, necessarily. They just didn’t have much to say, apparently. However, he did notice that Andi looked in every other direction but his when it came to the bathroom. It made him chuckle.

Several hours of silence passed by before Andi spoke up randomly. “This has to be boring for you.”

“It’s fine.”

“Is it?”

Sawyer shrugged as he kept his eyes staring blankly at the floor. “Fine enough,” he sighed, “Rather be down here than doing anything else, honestly.”