Page 193 of Somno Slave

“Are you okay?”

Her gaze snaps upward too slowly. For a second she looks genuinely lost, like she no longer recognises the room around her. Then the expression shutters closed almost painfully fast.

“Yeah,” she says. “Spider.”

It’s pathetic. An obvious lie. But nobody challenges it. The chalice becomes plastic again before anyone else understands there was ever anything wrong with it.

She lowers herself back into the chair carefully after that, like she no longer fully trusts the distance between her body and the floor. Water glistens across the desk beneath. A thin stream drips slowly over the edge and onto her trousers.

Peter keeps watching her, and she feels it.

I can tell by the way her spine slowly straightens beneath the weight of his attention, every movement becoming slightly too controlled after that. Human bodies are not designed to survive scrutiny for long. Eventually they begin performing themselves badly.

And she is performing now.

Breathing manually.

Blinking manually.

Trying to arrange her face into something capable of surviving another hour in this room.

She keeps swallowing. Dry mouth. I can see the effort it takes now. Every few minutes her tongue wets her bottom lip unconsciously before she catches herself and stops. The lights above the observation room flatten the colour from her skin completely.

My restraints creak softly when I shift back in the chair.

Her eyes snap to me immediately.

The reaction happens before she can stop it this time. Her shoulders loosen first. Tiny. Barely there. But I see the breath leave her chest too quickly afterwards, like her nervous system settles the second it confirms my presence.

She still thinks this is attraction.

And it makes me smile.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Rheda

Tomorrow.

The word keeps catching on everything even if the room around me moves on.

Paper shifts beneath Peter’s hands while he reads through the next file. Sean resumes typing. Somewhere behind me, Mike mutters something about transport timing before lowering his voice again.

The world continues organising his death around me.

My stomach twists violently.

“No,” I hear myself say. “You can’t do this.”

The words leave me before I fully realise I’m speaking.

Peter straightens slowly. “Rheda—”

“No.” My pulse is climbing too fast now, voice tightening around it. “No, this is too fast.”

My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Tight. Breathless. “You don’t even have enough to support immediate execution.”

Peter’s expression barely changes. “The board disagrees.”