Page 41 of The Wolf and the Monarch

“I don’t know. Maybe an hour or so.”

“You could have woken me up.”

Benji shook his head. “Absolutely not. You let me sleep when I was recovering. You get the same treatment.”

He supposed that was fair. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m functional, I think. If your bastard uncle comes down here, I think I’ll survive.” Benji half-joked.

“Well, that’s a plus. It would really ruin the whole ‘let’s escape from here’ thing if you didn’t.”

Benji flicked his brows and shrugged a shoulder. “Guess that’s true.” He paused and shifted his gaze down towards his chest. “Do you want your hoodie back?”

“I don’t even know if I could get it on right now.”

He hummed. “Yeah… I’ll just hang onto it. You can tell me when you want it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Silence rolled over them once again. It wasn’t uncomfortable. But it wasn’t all that comfortable either. Sawyer could see Benji was thinking about something. “What’s on your mind?”

“That’s a loaded question.”

It sure was. “Start with the most pressing thing then.”

Benji tapped his fingers against his chest while he continued to stare off at the ceiling. Sawyer imagined he had several pressing issues so it was probably hard to figure out which of them was the most pressing. As Benji thought about it, Sawyer didn’t pester him about it. He just kept his brown eyes upon the other, taking the time to look him over.

He really did look exponentially better than he did two days ago. To be quite honest, Sawyer thought he was going to die. He had no idea how he didn’t. It wasn’t like Sawyer was a medical professional. Anything he did learn was from Google or Cole. And Cole wasn’t the best teacher. But whatever it was that Sawyer had done, it got him past the worst of it and now Benji was on the mend. They needed him to be as healthy as they could too considering Sawyer was now worse for wear.

“I guess my whole…family situation is pretty pressing,” Benji admitted with a frown, “I’ve been trying not to think about it but it’s hard not to when there’s only so many things to think about down here.”

Sawyer nodded. “Yeah, that…makes sense.”

“I still can’t wrap my head around it.”

“I doubt you’re supposed to be able to. It seems like that was the point of it. Whatever is happening by whoever didn’t want you to know a thing.”

Benji sighed. “It’s just…not fair.” Sawyer thought that really none of Benji’s situation wasn’t fair but that seemed beside the point. “I matter too. No matter what my dad thinks…”

“Of course you do.”

“It doesn’t feel like it when they do shit like this.”

Sawyer frowned. He supposed that made a lot of sense. Regardless of who did it or for what reason, they still put Benji in the line of fire. How could someone feel like they were cared about when that happened?

Benji just shook his head and shifted the subject. “I’ve been trying to think about how to get us out of here.”

“Have you come up with anything?”

“Not really. I don’t know how this place works,” he turned his head towards Sawyer, “I feel like getting us from point A to point B is going to be all you.”

He huffed and nodded. “Yeah…”

“How do you feel about that?”

Sawyer shifted a bit on the mattress and his eyes moved towards his bandaged hand. “Scared.”