All the Little Raindrops by Sheridan Mia

Author:Sheridan, Mia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Montlake
Published: 2023-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Cedro glanced over as the older man heaved into the metal toilet for the hundredth time. He groaned, wiping his mouth with his arm, and fell in a heap on the floor of his cage.

“You should be almost done,” Cedro remarked casually. He’d watched his father detox before. Messy. Gross. The man in the cage next to him had been puking his guts up for the past three days. Or what Cedro thought were three days, if he could count on the schedule of the lights turning on and off to tell him when it was day and when it was night. Until that morning, the man had been crazed, ranting and sweating and plain out of his mind. Lucky break for him in some ways. In others, not so much. Because now, with a sane mind, he’d have to come to terms with where he was.

“If you’ve been wondering if the cage was part of your sickness, it wasn’t,” Cedro said. “The cage is real. And your stench is definitely real. I can smell you from over here.”

“Shut the fuck up,” the man slurred, rolling over and gripping his head.

“Make me.”

The man pulled himself into a sitting position, gripping his bars and squinting over at Cedro. Cedro wasn’t good at guessing ages. The guy looked old to him, but part of that was probably because he’d spent a week at death’s doorstep. His eyes were sunken in, and though his hands were brown, his face was pale and was sorta green, and he had deep wrinkles that looked carved into his skin and a generous amount of gray in his short beard. Yes, he was at least oldish, and there was something just a little familiar about him.

“Who are you?” the man demanded, his voice scratchy.

“Cedro Leon.”

“I didn’t ask your name. Who are you?”

Cedro thought about that. Maybe the guy was asking because he was trying to figure out why he’d been snatched and locked in a cage with him in particular? Maybe it wasn’t random like he’d thought? And maybe the guy hadn’t barfed up every single one of his brain cells. “I’m nobody,” he said. He didn’t say it because he was sad or sorry about that. It was just true, and Cedro was a realist. He’d survived, so far anyway, in his life because he was honest, at least with himself. “I was crossing to the US. My brother’s seventeen, and he’s in Arizona. I was nabbed about an hour past the border.” He’d been stung by a bee, or so he’d thought for a brief second. He’d quickly brought his hand to his neck to swat the insect, and that was the last thing he remembered. He’d woken in the dark, and at first he’d wondered if he’d been caught by border-patrol agents, but when the lights never came on and he realized that even when his eyes had had time to adjust to the dark, all remained pitch black, he knew something was very wrong.

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