Felicity woke with her hand on her hip, reaching for the chipped marble. Her dress was gone. Somebody had put her in clean gray pants with no pockets and a gray shirt that buttoned at the neck. Across the passage, a woman at a desk was putting a glass ball into a bag with the rest of her things. Its broken edge snagged the cloth. She had watched Luna rub her thumb over that rough spot before she gave it away.
She waited for the woman to look down at her paperwork before she sat up. The cot was bolted to bare concrete. She could smell disinfectant, hot wiring and her own sour breath from the cloth they'd pressed over her mouth. The salt air of Tidehaven was gone. So was the hum of water that had followed her everywhere in the city, even when she'd gone to bed with a pillow over her ears.
She touched the bruise where a man's arm had pressed against her chest. It ought to take less light to heal than the mark on her hip had at the bank. Instead, the effort made her teeth hurt, and her stomach turned over.
"Do not attempt to use an ability," a woman's voice said from the speaker overhead. "You arrived in good condition. You'll want to stay that way."
Felicity took her hand off the bruise. Nobody who actually gave a damn about her condition had ever bothered to specify what state she arrived in. A woman in another gray shirt hid one swollen hand in her sleeve when a guard passed. The doors had numbers where names might have gone. Felicity had worked a supply ledger. She knew how people kept stock.
The lights stayed bright, so she kept time by the inspections. Nobody opened two doors along the passage at once. An attendant brought water. A guard waited behind him while he checked her teeth, looked under her hair and marked a square on a sheet. His hand smelled of boiled eggs, which made her briefly and unreasonably furious. He'd sat down to breakfast before coming to examine her like a horse.
She made the second inspection quicker than the first. She tipped her chin when he wanted to see her throat, held out her hands before he asked and spent the extra seconds looking behind him. There were stairs at both ends of the passage. The ones by the desk went up. The ones under the speaker went down. Her clothes and Luna's marble went upstairs with the sealed bags. The women they took downstairs didn't come back past her door.
Thinking about her husbands helped as long as she let herself think about all of them. Victor would be furious, but she also remembered the patience it took for a man his size to let two little hands work a stubborn buckle. Voss would look for the way she'd gone. She'd left a chair wrong side up in a house where he knew every stick of furniture. Even if the guards righted it, he'd see the scratches in the door where its leg had caught. They both knew the cubs came first. She could eat the dry bread the attendant gave her and do her part to make sure there was a mother left for them to find.
When they came for her, she was on her feet. Walking was easier than being dragged, and it gave her a chance to count what they passed. Down one flight, through two heavy doors, then down again until the concrete gave way to old stone. At the second door the pressure behind her eyes grew sharp enough to make her stumble. She saved herself on the rail. Her power had already cost her one decent breath for no result. She left it alone.
Below the electric lights the corridors smelled of oil smoke. There were deep claw marks in a wooden frame and a narrow window high enough to admit air without letting her see the ground outside. One of the guards knocked in a pattern. He waited until the door swung inward, gave her a little push between the shoulders, and whisked his hand back as if the man inside might keep it.
The man at the window had a snake's tail coiled across the cold stone. His scales were black, with little flashes of gold when the light caught the edges. He could have reached the door before either guard got a hand to a weapon. He let them close it. Of the things she'd learned about him in the last six seconds, that was the one to remember.
"Sit down," he said. The couch and the bed were both on the far side of his tail, so she settled on the floor with her back to the wall. When he turned and saw her there, he drew his coils aside. His eyes were yellow, the pupils narrow as stitches. "I didn't mean you had to sit on the floor."
"It was one of the few places in here you weren't already using." It came out sharper than she'd meant it to. She waited for the slap. Instead he picked up a metal cup, filled it with clean water and put it in reach on the end of the couch.
"My name is Damien. I don't want you to be frightened of me," he said.
"I wish it worked like that," she told him. He took that better than the guards would have done. He said he was sorry she'd been brought here and gave her broth, warm bread and meat with the little burnt edges she liked. She ate the edges first. If this was her last decent dinner for a while, she was damned if she was saving the best bits for a man who could pick them off the plate after she died.
"What do you want me to do now?" she asked once she'd set down the spoon. She'd put off that question as long as a person reasonably could with one bowl of broth.
"Sleep if you can. You can have the bed, and I'll be over here." His tail barely fit the length of the couch, even coiled tight. He found an extra blanket so she could take off her shoes and keep the rest of her clothes on. He turned his back while she got under it.
Felicity could hear his scales scrape softly against the couch as he settled down. She would have liked to believe he was a decent man in a rotten place, mostly because she badly wanted to sleep. There was still that knock on the door to account for. Men carrying a prisoner had known exactly where to bring her, and Damien hadn't needed to ask either of them why she was there. She tucked her hands under the blanket and held on to the question she'd ask him when he woke. What had those men been promised in exchange for her?