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“Cry?” I sob, sniffing between every heaving breath.

“Yeah, that.” He pulls his finger from my chin, wipes the tears from my cheeks in two sweeps and dries it on my shoulder. “Follow me.”

He leaves the cell, reaching the side of the couch before he turns and sees that I’m not following him. I’m still sitting against the wall, every breath rolling through my body with such force that my hands and feet go numb. My lips tingle as tears dribble past.

Eli huffs a huge lungful of air and thunders back into the cell. I’m not fast enough to form a scream between gasps before his hands are around my ribs. He lifts me up and tosses me over his shoulder. My stomach collides with his hard muscles and bones, and he wraps a firm arm over my lower back. Only the back of his legs and the stone floor are visible as he marches me out of the cell and into the room closest to the stairs.

He plops me down on one of three wooden benches and locks us inside with the flick of a stone. “Don’t move.”

Chapter

Eighteen

Eli watches me closely as I take in the room, the edges blurring from my heavy breathing, the lack of blood in my brain. Light stones are set into the ceiling, illuminating the flowers that line all four walls. The stalks are taller than me, the blooms as big as my hand with a reflective yellow center wreathed with green and purple petals.

Twig baskets litter the floor, loaded with trimmings in all different stages of drying, from freshly cut to shriveled and lifeless. The scent of cloves saturates the air and burns my nose. It smells like him…or the other way around. The aroma fills me, sucked in with my ever-quickening breaths.

He sits at the opposite end of the bench, tucking in close to a wobbly three-legged table only large enough for one. His curlsglimmer in the overhead light, catching in all the right places, the tips grazing his cheekbones and making it even harder to breathe.

Even through the gasps, the question lodges in my throat: How could someone so heartless pull me in, blotting out the doubt and the warnings coming from deep within? He pauses, his hands stilling, and glances my way, wearing such a vulnerable look. It’s as though he owns that doubt in me and decides when to dole it out.

I’ll pass out if I don’t slow my panicked breathing, but I can’t get Kelter out of my head. I can’t forget that I’m not home, that I’m here…with Eli. I grip the splintery bench as the dizziness sets in, focusing on the movement of his hands to keep me from swaying. The surface of the table is hidden by a crispy layer of dried petals and piles of thin paper cut into squares. He arranges a few pinches of petals in the center of one of the squares, and his speedy fingers work in unison to roll the paper into a thin stick. His tongue glides across the edge of the paper. Once, twice and back once more, and he seals it.

I try to speak, to let him know the room is going black—because evenhimcatching me would be better than smashing my head into stone—but I don’t manage more than one incoherent syllable at a time.

He shushes me, a finger to his lips, and slides down the bench. He reaches his arm around my back, rising and falling with me as the lungfuls come and go. His hand appears near my mouth, holding the pale green roll. I should yell, push him away, but the blackness elbows its way in. In my last shrinking sphere of sight, his other hand comes around my front with a small black stone. He holds it to the end of the roll, and it lights in a dazzling red blaze. It’s the last I see before the room goes dark.

He puts the tip of the roll in my mouth and lifts my chin, forcing my lips to seal around it just as I inhale deeply. Mythroat is on fire. The smoke burns all the way down. He pulls the roll away and seizes me with hands as cold and rigid as metal, covering my mouth and pinching my nose.

The smoke inside me demands to escape, demands the same freedom I seek. Freedom from this castle…this mind. Spicy metallic fumes tear at my lungs, threatening to burst them, to leave only fragments of the once life-supporting organ. I battle against his hands that hold us captive, the smoke and me, tortured and trapped.

At last he lets me go. I fall to the floor, freeing the smoke on my way down, deflating with a gloriouswhoosh. I cough from the deepest depths of my vengeful lungs, until my muscles ache and my ribs pose to crack. When I can finally breathe without breaking into the violent contractions of a coughing fit, I look up at Eli.

He slouches on the bench, toking away at the tiniest shred of remaining roll between his fingers, not a care in the fucking world.

“Better?” he asks, slowly releasing a puff of clove-scented purple smoke.

I’m not gasping anymore, but my head might float off my shoulders. Relief and contentment settle in my chest, and I’m…okay—furious, but okay—and much too calm to act on such a piddly thing as anger…which is melting away. I pull myself back up to the bench and mop away the tears forced out of me.

“I think so.” I can’t remember what was wrong, only that he took it away. “What was that?”

“Teva.” He inspects the barely there roll. “It calms, and it’ll have a stronger effect on you because you’re not used to it.”

His lightness is back, lowering my defenses against him even further. It doesn’t seem to matter what he does or says; my body decides how to feel.

“You…” I squint at him, my mind slow.

“What?”

“You brought me in here because you care.”

His head jerks in surprise. “No.”

“Yes, I was crying and—”

“And it was annoying,” he interrupts, his tone cold and composed.

A slow smile scales my cheeks, courtesy of the teva. “And you wanted to help.”