Page 112 of Feral King

I force my eyes wide open.

I’m in a massive, abandoned warehouse with high ceilings and exposed steel beams. It reminds me of a gigantic, industrial skeleton. Fluorescent tubes flicker overhead, casting everything in an eerie glow.

There are no windows, just a large rolling door to my left and a smaller door behind me. It’s half open and appears to lead to a corridor that I can’t see down. The air smells like stagnant water and old gas.

I have no idea if I’m even still in New York.

I roll over, seeing that I’m tied to a support column. There’s no furniture. Whoever kidnapped me had no intention of making me comfortable.

And then I see her.

Standing ten feet away, leaning against a folding table with a phone in her hand and mascara streaking down her face, is Sophia.

She’s looking at me. Her expression cycles through guilt, fear, and defiance before settling on a forced blankness, like she’s trying her hardest to look unaffected.

“You’re awake,” she says.

I groan, trying to sit up. The effort makes my shoulder sing in pain.

“Sophia.” There’s a surprising strength in my voice despite how goddamn scared I am.

“Lyra—”

“You set me up.” My throat is raw, my vocal chords painful and tender from all the screaming. “The phone call, the warning… you called me, so you’d know exactly where I was.”

She doesn’t deny it. She glances down at the phone in her hand, then sets it on the table.

“They already knew where you were,” she says. “Alex had people following you and Misha the minute you left the clinic. The call wasn’t to track you—it was to distract you.”

“Well, congratulations; it worked.” I pull against the zip ties. “Where’s Misha?”

“I don’t know. They left him in the car, I think.”

“He was shot, Sophia. He was shot in the chest. Is he even alive?” Part of me doesn’t want to hear the answer, for fear that it might be no.

“I… I don’t know.” She says it with a flat affect that suggests she’s trying to compartmentalize “I wasn’t there. I was here, waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me.”

“Yeah. Waiting for you.”

The lights buzz overhead. Somewhere in the distance, I hear water dripping in a slow, irregular rhythm.

I stare at the woman who used to be my best friend, feeling something colder than anger.

“How the hell did this happen, Sophia? How did you get from the maternity store, telling me how sorry you were tothis?”

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, looking down at the floor. Something about the way she seems ashamed about what she’s doing makes me even angrier.

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re holding me hostage in a warehouse. It’s not that complicated.”

Sophia’s jaw tightens. She picks up the phone again, sets it down, then picks it up again. I can see that her hands are shaking.

“Alex came to me after that day in front of the maternity store,” she says. “He knew I’d talked to you. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. He said that I was compromising the plan, that I’d tipped you off, and if the plan got screwed because of me, he’d?—”

She stops andswallows.