Chapter 7 · The Bolt That Won't Give

"You built a cage you can't even open," I said. My voice actually worked, which felt like a small miracle in the dark.

Calder didn't answer. I heard him instead — metal shrieking against a track it was never meant to shriek in, and under that, low and steady, words his mother definitely never taught him. The bolt he'd thrown himself, the one that was supposed to keep me in, wasn't sliding back for him either.

"Move," he said, not to me. To the door. Like it owed him something.

The dark had teeth. That's the only way I can describe it — no window, no strip of light under the hatch, nothing but the hiss of my own lungs and the smell of him filling up the room like water finding every low spot. Cedar. Gun oil.

Something hot underneath both, something that had nothing to do with the panic room and everything to do with the fact that his hand was still fisted around my inhaler, six inches from my face, and I couldn't see it. I could only feel the air where it used to be.

"Calder.