Prisoner

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

I woke up feeling like absolute fucking shit.

My vision was on the blurry side and it took lots of blinking to clear that shit up. My throat was sore, like I'd been screaming for years and my head throbbed like there was a dinosaur rampaging in there.

I was definitely sick. It wasn't the stab wound or even any of the other injuries I might have. It was a straight up fucking cold, or the flu, or something.

Of course, I'd gotten sick in the past, once or twice. After the first time, though, I'd learned my lesson about telling guardians how you felt. Even worse, with a mad scientist like Hades around, I wasn't about to go advertising a weakness to these people.

It was just insanely frustrating trying to find some alone time.

Ever since the stabbing incident, someone was in my room at all times. If it wasn't Lucy or Hades, it was Ryk or River or one of the Hadiferian brats. It was taking every ounce of energy I had to keep playing along, to act completely natural. The last thing I needed was for Hades to stuff me in a test tube and do experiments on me or stuff drugs down my throat.

"You look a bit pale," River commented suddenly, making me blink and look up to see him coming over to the sofa with a mug of tea. He had offered me some earlier, but I'd never had tea before I came to this place and so far, I was not a huge fan. It was too bitter, even with honey in it.

"I'm fine," I said dryly, watching the cat sprint across the TV screen after his mousey adversary.

"You've been off since the attack," River pointed out, making me roll my eyes as he took a seat on the opposite end of the sofa, "Are you still hurting somewhere? Have you been eating enough? Sleeping enough?"

"Gods, you sound like Ryk," I groaned, raking a hand through my hair and grabbing a pillow to hit River in the arm with. He rolled his eyes and took the pillow away.

"Of course I do. I'm concerned," he said, making me scoff, "It's perfectly normal to be concerned about another person, especially if that person is an eligible suitor." I tried not to roll my eyes so hard they disappeared into my head.

Perfectly normal. Maybe for them. It didn't make sense to me. There was no reason for him to be concerned, even if I was an eligible suitor, as he put it. It wasn't him that was hurt. It wasn't him that was threatened. Eligible suitor or not, he had no idea who I was. For all he knew, I could secretly be drinking the blood of everyone in this household until they all die. So why the fuck was he so nice to me?

When I had asked Lucy, he'd said it was totally normal to be nice to other people, especially if that person in particular liked you romantically and I tried not to snort so hard I choked.

Those were all interesting new words I'd learned. Nice. Like. Romance. The people around here talked about that shit all the time, and they partook of it too. I wasn't fucking dumb or deaf. I could hear people in the night when I walked by their rooms. I'd almost caught Cain and Abel in the kitchen once, but Cain threw a pan at my head and apparently that ruined the mood for Abel. Ruined my mood too.

Thank fuck Cain and Abel were outta this place for a few days, though. It sounded like the children of Lucy and Hades cycled in and out of the house all the time. Cerberus and Theo had also taken off. Now it was just Hades, Lucy, and I with the guests. Ryk showed up once and a while, but he was clearly still pissy about his fight with Hades, so he avoided the big god like the plague.

But anyway, it seemed dumb for River to be nice to me because he liked me. He was always complaining about my language, my mouth, my fashion sense, my manners. That was normal to me, but how the fuck was that nice? It just didn't make any sense.