Two water droplets dripped from the ceiling of my cell. I silently counted to three, and was rewarded with another two drips.
"Urgh." I hit my head against the wall behind me.
It was hard to decide which of the two was more torturous; the silence, or the dripping noise that regularly interrupted it. The constant pain in my ribs, where one of them had been fractured and kicked through my lung came as a strong contester, but the cold was making my whole body numb to the point where I mostly stopped feeling that pain.
"Shut up!" My neighbor yelled.
"I didn't say anything!" I tried to yell back, but my voice came out jagged, and I was suddenly taken by a coughing fit.
"I said shut up!" My neighbor yelled again and hit his fist against our common wall, to accentuate his point.
"Keep it down." A guard’s voice came from down the hall.
I slammed both hands over my mouth, trying to muff the sound of my coughing as much as I could - but that wasn't enough. Heavy footsteps echoed through the hallway and soon stopped before my cell. I looked up, hoping that the coughing fit would stop any second, even if deep inside I knew that it was impossible with whatever illness I had. The prison guard seemed to know that too.
Without breaking eye contact, he unlocked the door to my cell. The noise his keys made was unbearably loud, in steep contrast to his soft, controlled, footsteps in the cell.
I tried to crawl away, into a corner. But between all my injuries, those from the failed heist, and never ones, courtesy of the guards here, and the itch inside my lungs that made me want all by cough them out, I couldn’t move much.
The guard yanked me away from the wall, and kicked me in the back. Then in the stomach. I tried to roll up, but he kicked me again, forcing me to lay on my stomach.
The fact that the man wasn't even saying anything only made it worse.
The pain would have been so much more bearable if he'd yell at me - tell me what I had done wrong. Coughing couldn’t be the only thing counting as a crime in his book, and I feared what would come of me if I were to do something worse.
The other, disgusting, side of it was that I needed to hear someone else voice. It had been weeks since I’ve heard more than a few words thrown here and there, and I was longing for it in a way I could not describe. It didn’t matter if it were to yell insults at me …
I realized it was over when I heard the door of my cell slam shut.
Every single centimeter of my body hurt, and I thanked the cold from preventing me to distinguish the old pain from the new.
I crawled back to my resting spot; the wall that wasn't as wet and slimy as the rest. And took a slow, shaky, breath, hoping that the cough would not return. Then, I closed my eyes and tried to think of good things, of my life before I got thrown to jail. The memories were fuzzy, distant and distorted, but for a few brief moments, I was no longer here.
I was nested comfortably within Adrian’s strong arms. We were sitting in front of the fireplace in his house at the edge of town, chatting about one thing or the next, prices on the market, ships that had left port that day, or perhaps our next heist.
But the reverie didn’t last, as I remembered that with me being in jail, and not contacting him after the mission, or the weeks following it, he'd probably broken up with me. I sigh. He definitely had, since I knew he still had the money from our last job, but hadn’t not tried to bribe or buy me out of here. And I understood that. Living with a dirty thief was one thing, but who would want to associate themselves with an incompetent thief?
To add insult to injury, my neighbor suddenly snarkyly spoke:
“Told you to shut up.”
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