Steelhands - Jaida Jones [161]
On the downside of being taken away quiet—followed back to my office like it was a meeting they were after, the enemy let through the gate by my own damned lecturer’s assistant—was not knowing how long it’d take before anyone knew I was missing. And a whole lot of shit could happen to a man in a short amount of time. Especially when Dmitri wasn’t involved, because at least I knew he was a fair lot who liked to ask a man questions before beating his head in.
But it’d been four and a half full hours—I’d developed a system for telling time in case I was ever taken captive by the enemy, locked up in a dark little cell like this one—and my head was still in the same shape as ever.
No one had even come to see me; I’d just been put out of the way like an out-of-fashion hat, stored somewhere dark until somebody had use for me.
There was noise coming from other parts of the prison, which could only mean one thing: I wasn’t the only one who’d been arrested.
I had to hope that they hadn’t taken one of my boys—that they’d gone after me because of all the snooping I’d been doing on my own and not because I was calling secret meetings of the ex–Dragon Corps in Luvander’s hat shop. If the latter was true, then I’d sent one of my students—someone I’d been trying to look after, and keep safe—straight into the eye of the storm. I cursed myself for that misstep, but I hadn’t figured the situation was dire enough.
Yet here I was, suffering the consequences of letting my guard down just because it wasn’t wartime anymore. I had to hope my other inmates were strangers, and that someone’d come along eventually who’d slip up and give me the information I needed to know even though I was likely going to be the man being questioned.
I’d heard the sound of footsteps three hours after my arrest, and then again at the four-and-a-half-hour mark.
Only half an hour later—give or take a few minutes—at the five-hour mark, I heard footsteps again. These came closer than the others; it took me only a few moments to realize they were coming for me.
The way I was being kept wasn’t too uncomfortable. I wasn’t even chained up properly, just a shackle around one ankle. There was a chair in the corner of the cell, but no bed, which meant I probably wasn’t meant to stay there long. It was more likely a holding cell than anything else—an in-between prison, before the serious shit happened. I sat on the chair, folded my arms over my chest, and got all questions off my face.
Barely a moment later, the door to my cell opened.
“Good evening, Adamo,” said a familiar young man. I recognized his face, but it took his name a couple more seconds to come to me. That piss-pot in Balfour’s apartment—Troius. “I told you I had connections, didn’t I? Try not to look surprised on my account.”
I hadn’t looked surprised, and we both knew it. I resettled in the chair, not giving him the satisfaction of answering him.
“Well, all right,” he said. “Suit yourself.”
He was dressed different than before, wearing some kind of uniform, all black. There was a familiar smell on him, too, something that brought back good memories rather than bad ones. Dragonsmoke, mostly; the stink of hot metal.
“It doesn’t have to be this way between us, you know,” Troius said, folding his arms. “I actually respect you enormously. I was excited to see you in Balfour’s apartment that day, though of course I was saddened to realize what it meant—that you were conducting meetings behind the Esar’s back, no doubt about a little matter concerning his hands? You couldn’t be content with your status as heroes, could you? Some people never can appreciate their good luck. They just have to press it.”
“So is this my sentence?” I asked, shifting around in my chair. “You gonna stand there and talk me to death?”
“Death?” Troius asked, shaking his head. “I’ll never understand why you men of war always leap to that dire conclusion without pausing to consider any of the steps in between. He’s like that, too, you know—the Esar. It’s why he needs someone like me. I believe I told you before that I come from a very