“We are trying, Blair. We want a life here. The Wolves are not bad people, well, maybe the odd one, but most of them are happy with the way things are run here. The boys go to school. Your mum helps out at the bakery when she hasn’t got Braelyn attached to her. Alpha Dane lets me work on the gate now.”

“Braelyn?”

“Your sister.” He smiles to himself.

“Can I meet her?”

He shakes his head, “Not while you are down here and not until you are no longer considered a threat.”

“A threat? I can’t smell anything other than my own stench. I can’t hear anything other than your words. I can’t heal. I almost passed out and I get this weird feeling in my stomach, yet you think I’m a threat.”

“Then prove everyone wrong.”

He turns to leave and then turns back, taking an apple out of his jacket. Placing it just inside of my bars, he sighs. “Here, it’s not much, but I could hear your stomach from the top of the steps. If you want a chance Blair, I suggest you do everything they ask of you.”

He didn’t know I already had a job.

“What if that isn’t enough?”

“Then I guess you didn’t try hard enough.”

I stare at the apple for sometime. Ryken had no reason to be kind to me. No reason to tell me to prove myself. If anything, I thought he would be grateful that I was going to be killed.

Taking the apple, I retreat to the back of my cell, letting the shadows wash over me. I don’t eat the apple, but I do roll it in my fingers, trying to figure out what I can do to get something useful out of Sammie.

Time passes differently down here. It’s dark all the time unless they leave a light on. The only way I could tell if it was night or day is when one of us was taken out. So I had no idea how long it was before Sammie returned.

She is full on crying as Abraxas shoves her down the stairs. And this time, it didn’t sound fake. As she comes into view, my mouth drops open. He had shaved her head right down to the skin. Sammie is balder than I am.

Strands of her long blonde hair still clung to the dirty sweatshirt she is wearing and as Abraxas pushes her into the cell, she rushes to her own dark

corner.

“Maybe next time you won’t lie.” He sneers as he turns away, not bothering to stop to look at me.

“Sammie?” I whisper when the door closes and we are left alone.

Her cries fill the air. “He shaved my head. He took it all.”

“Why?”

“He kept saying I was lying. That I’m hiding things. He shaved it as punishment.”

“It will grow back.” It was what she had always said to me when I found myself mindlessly running my hands through the fluff that was my hair. “He’s cruel.” She snarls.

“He’s punishing us. He can’t shave my hair because it’s already gone.”

“Do… do you have any food?” She whispers

I I look at the apple. She could smell it, just like she had scented the protein bar, if I kept withholding my treats, she might become suspicious and stop talking to me. Then, I would really be writing my death sentence.

“My stepdad was here. He brought me an apple. Do you want it?”

“An apple?”

I nod and step into the light to show her. “I can roll it to you.”

“Thank you, you don’t know how much this means to me. My stomach is so sore.”

I take a bite and then slip it through the cell bars, pushing it hard enough so that it rolls to her.

She devours that thing in seconds, stupid girl. She should have made it last.

“What did he ask you?” I needed to know everything.

“He wanted to know if there was anyone else?”

“Anyone else? Like someone else that has been made Human?”

She hesitates. “He thinks I’m working with Cooper. They all doz They don’t believe me. It doesn’t matter what I say, they are dead set on the idea. You have to tell them they are wrong!”

“Did you tell them they are wrong?”

“Of course. But that guy, he just stared at me, then he asked me about a girl called Madison.”

“Madison?”

“I’ve never met anyone by that name, Cooper never…..”

“Never what?” My knuckles whiten as I clench the bars.

“He never brought anyone to the prison by that name.”

“Did you meet the other prisoner’s?”

“A couple.”

It wasn’t what she had told me before. She had reeled off a similar story to mine about being kept confined for ny nine percent of the day.

“This isn’t much different, is it?” I gesture to the walls. “Though I can’t believe you managed to kill someone in the library, that couldn’t have been easy.”

“It wasn’t, but I did it.” She sounds proud.

Isn’t it amazing how easy Sammie

slips up when she feels someone is on her side, She told me she had killed someone in the bathroom so she could escape, not the fucking library. I don’t even know if the prison had a library.

But it was becoming clearer and clearer about how much bull shit I had fallen for.