Chapter 277 Trading Looks
ADRIANA
The metal spreader was sitting on the table when I walked in, and I picked it up and turned it in my hands and let him look at it for a while before I said anything.
He’d been chained to the wall since they brought him down, and whatever composure he’d maintained through the party had eroded significantly over the past hour. He was still trying to perform indifference but his eyes kept going to the instruments on the table and coming back to me with a calculation behind them that told me he was afraid and was trying to determine whether being afraid was the correct response.
It was.
“This,” I said, holding it up, “is not for your mouth.” I watched his face. “It’s for somewhere considerably less comfortable. It expands whatever cavity it’s inserted into.” I set it back on the table. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Elijah was standing against the far wall with his arms folded. Hazel was near the door. Neither of them said anything and I didn’t need them to.
I nodded to the guards and they came forward and held him down, two on his shoulders, one at his head. I picked up the spreader again and opened his mouth and fit the device in so the jaw was held wide.
He hadn’t understood what was coming and his body registered the surprise before his mind caught up, and he went still with the specific stillness of someone who has just understood they are not in control of what happens next.
“Here’s your situation,” I said, crouching slightly so I was at eye level with him. “My daughter has been away from me for hours. She is an infant and she is hungry and she is frightened and she is somewhere I cannot reach her yet.” I kept my voice completely even. “I have been patient tonight. I have been at a party and made speeches and smiled at people and been patient, and I have run out of patience.” I stood back up. “So this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me where she is. And then we’re going to talk about who sent you. And if anything you tell me is wrong or incomplete or designed to send me somewhere you think I won’t be able to get back from, I will come back here and we will have a very different conversation.”
There was a bottle of water on the side table and I picked it up and poured it slowly into his open mouth. He gagged and struggled and the guards held him steady until he’d swallowed most of it.
“That was water,” I said. “So you understand what the process feels like.”
I set the water bottle down and picked up the bleach from the floor, cleaning bleach, the kind used for the cells, sharp and chemical and unmistakable in smell. I opened it and held it near him without pouring, and the reaction was immediate, his eyes went wide in a way that all the performance of calm couldn’t cover, his body straining against the guards with a desperation that hadn’t been there before.
“One of the guards told me I shouldn’t be doing this,” I said. “Because I’m the Queen and apparently there are things that aren’t befitting. What they don’t seem to understand is that I now run this prison.” I looked at the guard who had spoken and he looked at the wall. “Which means nothing that happens in these cells happens without my authorization. Which means I can authorize whatever I decide is appropriate.” I looked back at the man in the chains. “And right now I’m deciding that appropriate is whatever gets my daughter home tonight.”
I removed the spreader from his mouth and the guards loosened slightly, and he coughed and worked his jaw and looked at me with the first genuine fear I’d seen from him all evening.
“Who sent you?” I said.
Nothing.
I picked the spreader back up.
“Wait—” He said it fast, the word coming out rough. “Wait. Wait.”
“You have thirty seconds.”
“He came to our crew maybe three months ago. He just walked into our space like he owned it and said he had a job for me. He only said it was a baby. He didn’t say whose baby, he didn’t say your baby. We’re contractors. We take jobs. We didn’t know it was the King’s child.”
“You took a baby from a military school graduation in broad daylight,” I said. “You didn’t ask questions.”
“We don’t usually ask questions. It’s not how it works.” He spat out.
“Where is she?”
“I can take you to her.” He looked at me steadily. “I’m the only one who knows exactly where the location is.”
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I looked at Elijah. Elijah looked back at me with the expression of a man who had been holding himself at a specific temperature for the last hour and was doing it through considerable effort.
“Chain him properly and get him ready to move,” I said to the guards. “We leave in ten minutes.”
I looked at the man on the floor. “If you’re taking me somewhere to hand me over to your employer, understand that I have more guards than you have friends and I have a knife I’m quite good with and I have nothing left to lose tonight. So think carefully about every decision you make between now and the time my daughter is back in my arms.”
He nodded. He believed me. He should.
The question of how to get him out of the building without the party guests noticing took approximately four minutes to solve, because there was a back exit through the lower level that came out on the service road, and I had apparently never needed to use it before because I hadn’t known it existed.
“We go out the back,” Elijah said, already moving.
“What about Leo? He’s up there managing the party alone—”
“Not for long.” Elijah glanced at me. “I’ll tell him on my way through.”
“Don’t tell him where we’re going—”
“I’ll tell him what he needs to know.” He looked at me with the expression that meant he understood exactly how much Leo could handle and had already calibrated the information accordingly. “Two minutes.”