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“Well, then.” With a gallant bow, he stepped aside and motioned forward with his hand. “Allow me to get out of your way.”
“Thank you.”
Nyx was tempted to offer him her palm, but there was no reason to be petty, and that did seem like a taunting move. So instead, she walked by him—
And kept going.
For the first fifty yards, she had one ear on what was behind her. She expected him to follow her or call her back. And when there were no footfalls and she didn’t hear her name, she was relieved. She didn’t like the prowling frustration he caused, and she sure as hell could take care of herself—
“Enough,” she muttered. “Just stop with him.”
The rights she needed to take came at the proper intervals, what she remembered for distances between turns the same as what she was finding. When she came to the last corner, with no scents in her nose or sounds in her ears, she felt triumphant. Rounding the final right, she—
Stopped dead in front of a massive steel wall.
Wrenching around, she recounted her turns in her head. Pivoted back around.
No, this was wrong. There was another fifty yards, and then there were the locked steel panels across the entry she’d used coming in here. The ones she had the pass card to.
Putting her palms against the cold metal, she pushed at the barrier even though she knew that was going to get her nowhere. The damn panels had dropped down from the ceiling and were bolted together. Did she think she was going to punch a hole in them?
“Shit.”
As sweat broke out under her arms and across her chest, she felt herself begin to panic. But then she turned her head and saw the blinking light on the wall.
“Pass card . . . pass card . . .”
With shaking hands, she went under the tunic and patted every pocket she had. Just as she was convinced she’d lost it along the way, she felt the stiff card. Ripping the thing out, she jabbed it at the reader pad that was bolted onto the rock wall.
Nothing.
She went up with it. She went down. Across. She tried both sides of the card. Twice.
“Shit.”
As she considered her options, time was not her friend, and if she did the math right on the distances, then the barrier also blocked her from accessing the first hidden passage Jack had taken her into— because that one was closer to where she had entered the prison from the crypt. Her only shot at getting hidden and doing a proper reset on her plans was going back to the pool.
If she could make it—
Voices.
And the telltale marching. Of many, many boots.
Nyx began to tremble. Putting her shoulder blades against the steel panels, she closed her eyes for a brief moment. Popping her lids back open, she quickly went into her pack and palmed up not one but two guns.
Assuming the guards were coming her way, her only chance was to try to shoot her way out of this.
Not that that was going to get her far. She was trapped down below, a prisoner just like all the others.
The Jackal returned to his cell in the nick of time. Just as he shot into his private space, he heard the first of the guards enter the corridor down at the other end. There were shouts of names and replies from prisoners as the Command’s detail walked the line, the sound of the boots getting louder as they came toward him.
Fuck, the scent of blood was all over him. Even though he’d changed tunics and rinsed his face off, that didn’t go far enough.
In the rear of his cell, in the corner, there was a ready stream of water that flowed down the crease where the rock walls met, and he ripped off his tunic, lunged forward, and shoved his head into it. On a ledge, he kept a bar of that homemade prison soap, the rotgut combination of lye and herbs like sandpaper, and he massaged the pumice-like egg in his palms under the rush, calling up the anemic suds.
Face. Neck. Chest.
Under his arms.
There was nothing he could do about his braid, but he didn’t think he had much blood in his hair—
“Lucan,” the guards called out.
Three cells away.
“Yesssss,” the wolven drawled. “Oh, I’m sorry, is this bothering you?”
Grabbing the fresh tunic, the Jackal dried himself and was about to hit his bed when he looked down at his pants.
“Fuck.”
More blood than he’d thought on them.
As the mouthy wolven went back and forth with the guards over Fates only knew what, the Jackal dropped his loose pants, washed what he could of his lower body, and dried off on his way back under his bed. He hid the stained pants under the platform.
Even though lying down was the last thing he wanted to do, he stretched out on his pallet, propped his head against the stone wall, and pulled the rough blanket over his nakedness. Throwing his hand down to his stack of old books, he grabbed the first one that hit his palm, brought the thing onto his chest, and held it open in front of his face.
