Page 61 of The Dead Don't Talk
Amo
My sniffles echo andmy best friend doesn’t even try to pretend they’re aren’t louder than the music she’s playing.
I can’t remember what the thing Cassia’s wrapped around is called but she seems good enough that they have her play in the square on days of rest sometimes.
Not that I really care at the moment, though, to ask her again what it’s called.
My men are currently both at the detention center, where they’re locking up Moros for the night.
Except most people don’t survive the night where he is.
“He is a bad man,” I cry for the tenth time and my best friend, the pillar of caring that she is, flicks something at my head.
“How do you know that?”
“Because Moros said so,” I mumble into my pillow and swipe my tears away on the fabric. “I just got him and now he’sgone.”
“You do know that he’s been in there before, right?”
My ears perk up. “He has?”
“Yeah, dummy. After the first time he tried to kill that same guy.”
“How do you know that?”
She rolls her eyes and stretches to her feet, setting aside the wooden instrument.
“I paid attention,andthey put it in the books.”
“Well?” I shoot to my feet and follow her around our place to her room. “Tell me what happened!”
She flits through the books on her shelf with a stiffness to her shoulders that I don’t like. “He really didn’t tell you anything about it.”
She doesn’t frame it like a question, but I answer her anyways.
“We haven’t done much talking.” I can feel her eye roll even though she’s not looking at me. “He’s pretty closed off about stuff.”
“Just not butt stuff.”
I snicker and lay out on her bed, the scent of lilac and soap wafting up around me. “Yeah, he’s pretty good at butt stuff.”
She fakes a gag. I laugh.
“Here it is. The new edition that Kyrt had made.”
Pulling the heavy stack of bound pages, she drops it next to my head with a thump.
“This is huge. I can’t read all this.”
“Then ask him what happened,” she groans out, flopping beside me. “This is probably garbage anyway.”
An unusual silence falls between us, and I look to find her chewing on her lip, her shorter hair falling into her eyes.
“What is it?”
“It’s just … you’re new to—ugh, fuck it. Whatever.Are they good to you?”
I blink for a long moment, the journey she took me on in that one line a whole conversation where I didn’t participate.
