Equal Parts by Emma Winters Read Free Book Online Page A

stared at me for a long moment, then, with another sinister smile, bounced off the bed and out the door, locking it behind him.
    A while later, after I’d covered the pool of blood with my torn shirt and taken to simply wearing my sweater as the only top layer, a flap on the cell door creaked open and a paper bag was tossed in. With slightly shaky fingers, I opened it, fully expecting to find a dismembered head or a bomb – something to cement my suspicion that Achilles was certifiably insane – but instead found a tube of alcoholic wipes, another bottle of water, protein bars, and a bowl of steaming rice.
    What the…?
    He’s buttering you up , I reminded myself as I wolfed down the rice. I was past the point of caring if it was poisoned – I doubted it, seeing as Achilles had had a thousand opportunities to kill me and he hadn’t. He just wants your power. You don’t matter to him.
    Well, he had another thing coming. The sunshine I could provide didn’t appear in my system out of thin air. It had to have a source – I needed to fuel myself with happiness first, and only then could I transfer it to others.
    So, unless Achilles magically found a source of happiness for me, I wouldn’t be of much use to him within a week’s time. My sunshine would fade, and I would be left with an empty well. I hadn’t experienced that in years, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to again. It wasn’t pretty when a person ran out of all good feelings.
    I thought about Lucia, enjoying a blissful weekend with her boyfriend . About Mrs. Corbet, alone in the hospital, without me there to ensure she kept going. About Finn Cole, who, for all I knew, was being hunted down like a dog by Achilles at that very moment. About my parents, all the way back in Florida, with no idea where I was or what I was doing.
    The strangest thing was, I didn’t miss any of them. Not yet, anyway. I suspected I would, once Achilles grew tired of me and decided torturing me was the only way to ensure cooperation. And he would grow tired of me. I was the shiny new toy now, but my stubborn streak would become irritating eventually, and greed for my power would supersede care for my condition.
    I buried myself under the blankets of the cot, far away from the eyes I knew watched me from the cell door. Clutching my jacket together with one hand and the empty bowl in the other, in case I should need a weapon of some sort, I squeezed my eyes shut, and waited for morning to come.
     
    Four days passed. Three times a day, every day, Achilles would enter my cell, ask me to tell him how my power worked, and leave when I politely – but firmly – declined. Three times a day, I would get the same meal – bottle of water, bowl of rice, protein bar.
    There were no more visits from guards, no more threats or violence. And the boredom was almost as bad as the uncertainty of my future. Fear stopped me from asking Achilles what he planned to do with me, just as pride stopped me from asking him to let me go.
    I had used most of the wipes to mop up the blood from the first day, and flushed them down the toilet, so I had to use the remainder sparingly. Translation: I stank. I also suspected I was going a little insane, judging by the way I found myself talking to the hatch in the door one day.
    On the afternoon of the fourth night, the door opened, and I waited for Achilles’s skeletal face to appear. Sometimes he stayed to talk to me – probably waiting for me to slip up with information about my power; other times he simply asked for the information and left straight away when I rejected him.
    But tonight, a different man stepped into the cell. Achilles was sinister because of his face, and, if I was honest, his voice. He wore sinister as a costume, a cover for something unidentifiable below the surface.
    But this man was different. He carried sinister. It was woven into the fine threads of his expensive-looking suit; it bled from his manicured fingers and perfectly groomed facial