>
>
>
When we get out of here, maybe you can help me with that, she wanted to say.I have a movie checklist we could go down.
Somehow, with her hunger feeling like a bottomless pit, it was hard to believe that they had a future outside of this place. The biggest problem with captivity was that it trapped your mind, too. It was narrowing her horizons, squashing down the range of things she could focus on. Right now, she wasn’t even pining for escape. She was just pining forfood.
How long could they last without food?
Humans could sometimes starve for a surprisingly, even horrifyingly long time as long as they had enough water, and the fountains in their cages hadn’t stopped working. Water wasn’t a problem. And shifters were resilient, so they could probably cling to life even longer.
But those calculations dealt with thehumanbody, and neither of them were human right now. The physical demands and limitations of dragons and hellhounds were a mystery to her.
Clearly, Randolph Sebastian was an expert at coming up with scenarios so twisted and unnatural that no one could ever plan for them.
How long could Logan last like this?
Iz could handle a future where she didn’t make it out of here, where Sebastian succeeded in making her waste away to nothing. What sherefusedto accept was any scenario where Logan, who had already gone through so much, got left down here alone in the dark once again, stuck waiting to see if Sebastian would show him even a shred of mercy. Sebastian wouldn’t kill them like this deliberately—no dragon had an easy time destroying their hoard—but he could make a mistake. And if he did, Logan would be alone.
He deserved so much better than this.
>
And now she was worrying him, when that was the last thing she wanted.
She said the first thing that popped into her head: >
They hadn’t talked about it. Logan had clearly been trying to give her space to work through her feelings, and she appreciated that, but it was time for her to realize that if she hadn’t worked through her feelings about her father by now, she probably wasn’t going to do it anytime soon. And sharing the thorniest part of her past with him didn’t seem so scary, for some reason.
> Logan said softly. >
Iz thought her mother would like Logan, even if he didn’t know all the traditional rules of draconian etiquette. He had all the compassion and consideration at the heart of courtesy down pat, even if he didn’t express them with elaborate bows and long, dry acknowledgements of their respective lineages.
> she said.
Logan waited, radiating silent interest over their connection.
Iz took a deep breath.
She almost started with,It was like Sebastian said, but she didn’t want to bring him into this any more than she had to. Logan wanted it from her, so he would get it from her.
Besides, as conflicted as her feelings about her father were, he deserved better than to have his story summed up by someone so venomous and uncharitable. Whatever he’d done, he still looked like an upstanding pillar of the community next to Randolph Sebastian.
She showed him a mental image of her father, weighing it down with all her complicated, muddled emotions: >
No, she couldn’t do it like this. She needed to give him more than just a barrage of feelings and images, even if, in her mind, her father was forever inseparable from the awful sense-memory of being seventeen, bold and terrified at the same time, her confidence dissolving into nothingness as her father called her an ungrateful brat.
Deep breath number two.
> she said, forcing some calm into her inner voice. >
Logan nodded.
> Well, that was ridiculous, but she was stuck with it now. <
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