Page 53 of Beg the Night

He sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, his back against the bars. I couldn’t even look at him without picturing the way he literally licked my slickness off his fingers.

If only that drug had killed us.

It would’ve saved me this misery.

“No,” I answered on instinct. “Never.”

He eyed me skeptically. I wanted to ask him what we were both thinking.Did you feel that, too?

Instead, I kept my mouth shut.

“And your family? Your sister? What tier is she? What’s her gift?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Seeing my sister here had obviously been a surprise. One I had done all I could to avoid thinking about.

“I don’t know,” I sighed. It was a weak lie, one he would see right through. But how did I tell him the truth? How did I show him the pieces of myself that I hadn’t even taken out and looked at on my own? “We weren’t that close.”

I lowered my head and picked at my nails, unconcerned that I’d already caused them to bleed.

He watched me with such intensity, his attention bored holes into me and blanketed me with an invisible weight.

And there was nowhere I could go to hide. Not this time.

“Hm,” he started. “So you have a sister. Anyone else crawling around in the Ministry I should know about?”

I forced myself to keep my breath steady. “No. Everyone else is dead.”

One beat. Two beats.

“Your whole family is dead?”

I nodded.

“How?”

“Different things. Accidents. Illness. My younger sister died right before the Ministry found me and brought me here. I had just finished burying her with the others.”

A long silence fell upon us. Long enough that I dared glancing up at Sinner.

When I saw the pain in his expression, I immediately regretted seeking him out.

“You buried your own family?”

I shrugged, averted my focus again. “I had help. Until Katherine left and Jasmine died. Then it was just me.”

“Why did she leave? How did she end up with the Ministry?”

I shifted, no longer caring about what he could read in my body language. Let him see the discomfort. “You’re awfully talkative today.”

He scoffed. “And you’re awfully secretive. I can tell when you’re hiding things from me, Athena.”

Athena.That was the third time he’d called me by name.

I hated the way my body reacted at the memory of my name falling from his lips last night.

“You’re hiding things, too,” I asserted. “You think I can’t see the concrete walls you’ve built around yourself? People don’t do that when they have nothing to hide.”

He swallowed, but held my gaze. “Be very, very careful with what you say next.”

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