Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(58)

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Why are you lying to me?” His voice held no accusation, but guilt flooded me anyway. He had to tell me the truth, and he deserved the same from me. But if he found out someone had taken my memory, he wouldn’t stop fighting until he knew what had happened to me and who had done it. Until the guilty party was dead.

Or until he was dead.

I couldn’t let that happen, but short of a lie, I had no good answer. “I...”

“You don’t remember the last time we were in the same room?” There was something strange in his voice. Some odd mixture of disparate emotions. Concern and...relief? Or was I imagining that? “What happened, Delilah? How much time are you missing?”

I blinked up at him, surprised by a conclusion I probably should have expected. He knew me better than anyone in the world, since my mother had died, and redcaps were experts at interpreting things left unsaid. They had to be.

Still... “How did you know?”

He almost answered. I saw the impulse in his eyes. In the automatic opening of his mouth, as if he were about to speak. Then he thought better of it.

Though the fae couldn’t tell an outright lie, their methods of avoiding the truth ranged from simple omission of key details to the intentionally misleading delivery of information. The conscious decision not to tell me whatever he’d been about to say meant something. Something important.

“What aren’t you telling me, Gallagher?”

“What aren’t you telling me?” he demanded. “You don’t remember the night of my second fight. You don’t know what happened to my arm. You’re surprised by the length of my hair. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Falling asleep in your room the night of your first fight. You were newly bald, and they’d just used me to make you kill Argos, the hellhound.”

“That’s it?” His brows furrowed low over gray eyes. “There’s nothing else?”

“Nothing until I woke up this morning in a private cell. My new guard seems to know me. And evidently serving in the arena is my regular gig.”

“You’ve been at every one of my fights,” Gallagher confirmed. “But they haven’t let me speak to you in weeks.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I heard from Eryx that you’d been removed from the dormitory, but he didn’t know why.”

“How did he find out?”

Gallagher’s frown deepened. “Delilah, you see him all the time. He’s a favorite at parties. He’s a favorite at everything.”

“You don’t do parties?”

He nodded. “They won’t let me, if you’re serving. But they know better than to expect me to fight unless you’re there. To prove that you’re okay.”

“I’m so sorry—”

The cell door opened to reveal one handler carrying two food trays and another aiming his tranquilizer rifle at Gallagher. The man with the trays set them on the floor and slid them inside.

“Hey, can I get some clothes?” I stood to show them how badly Gallagher’s shirt fit me, but neither handler said a word. “Please. I’m just asking for a little dignity.”

The first handler closed the door, and their footsteps faded down the hall.

“Bastards.”

Gallagher chuckled. “You call them that every time.”

“How many times have we done this?”

“This?” he said as I handed him a tray loaded with a full rack of pork ribs without sauce, a baked potato with none of the fixings, a scoop of canned green beans and two pint cartons of milk. “We’ve only done this twice.”

“Twice before tonight, or including tonight?”

“Before tonight.”

I sank onto his sleep mat next to him with my tray.

“At least they’re feeding you better,” he said with a glance at my bowl of potato-and-ham soup, a whole wheat roll and two small plums.

“Yes, and I have no idea why. What am I missing, Gallagher?”

“I don’t know.” But he didn’t look at me when he said it. He was telling me the truth, but not the whole truth.

“What do you know?” I tucked my legs beneath me and set the tray on the mat.

“Nothing relevant to your memory loss, as far as I know. You have my word, and my word is my honor.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

“My reasons are personal. You saw me in undignified circumstances.” He looked up, and his gray-eyed gaze pleaded with me, even before his words did. “Please let that be enough, Delilah.”

“Of course.” If I could erase the memory of every undignified circumstance he’d seen me in, I would. I took a bite of soup and thought while I chewed. “What could have taken my memory? An encantado?”

“No.” He hadn’t touched his food. “They can alter how you experience reality, which can create a false memory, but they can’t leave your memory blank. It might be simpler than that, Delilah. Vandekamp has highly trained medical personnel, both doctors and cryptid vets.”

My pulse swooshed harder. “What are you saying?”

“Large doses of electric shock can damage a person’s memory. This could all be because of your collar, if they use it too often. Like a side effect.”