Read Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) for Free Online Page B

than this maddening scratching,
grating away at his already frayed nerves. Resigned, he waited for
the scraping to stop, as he knew it eventually would.
    It might have been minutes or it might
have been hours, but finally the moment came. Peace at last. Nikhil
groaned a long sigh of relief.
    Scratch, scratch, scratch,
scratch.
    Growling in frustration, Nikhil rolled
onto his side and beat the wall in front of him helplessly with his
fist.
    And then the noise stopped.
    Nikhil held his breath, afraid to
believe that the cacophony had finally ended. He heard one long,
smooth scrape like metal against stone, coming distinctly from the
base of the wall he was facing. And then nothing.
    Shaking his overlong black hair from
his eyes, he peered through the near-darkness. That last sound had
been different. He could pinpoint the source, and he was almost
certain he hadn’t imagined it. Something had changed.
    Nikhil ran his hand along the crease
between the wall and floor where he thought he’d heard the final
scrape. Nothing but cold, smooth cement – until his fingers closed
around something soft.
    Paper. A rolled piece of napkin maybe?
And next to it, a thin metal stick of some sort. Where had they
come from?
    Nikhil snatched up the foreign objects
and slid over to the door, holding them in the faint sliver of
light that leaked in through the crack at the base.
    He recognized the paper immediately –
a square torn from the thin napkins served with the dismal meals
that came through the flap in the door once or twice a day.
Unrolling it, he realized it was a note. The words were hard to
make out, but he ran his eyes over them frantically until the
message resolved.
    “ Hey, neighbor. Anybody in
there?”
    Nikhil’s heart pounded in his chest
and water threatened at his eyes. This was the first contact he’d
had in months, besides the guards. He thought back to what he
believed was the last time – his hands on the hips of a beautiful
dark-haired girl, her raised arms swinging in time with the music,
the most striking green eyes he’d ever seen sparkling up at him
from a veil of thick lashes. And then she was gone, the warmth of
her body replaced by pain, the blows of thugs beating him into
submission. And then the endless darkness and quiet. He couldn’t
even remember her name.
    There was space left on the scrap for
a response, but he wasn’t sure how to reply – then he remembered
the metal stick that’d come with it. He held it in the patch of dim
light and recognized one of the narrow support rods that wove
through the prison’s uncomfortable cots. The end had been whittled
to a point and was covered in some kind of dirty black
grease.
    Flattening the note against the floor,
Nikhil scrawled a reply. It’d been so long since he’d written that
his hand cramped with the effort.
    “ I’m Nikhil.” What do you
say to the stranger in the jail cell next to you? “You?”
    Rolling the paper up, he scooted back
along the floor to the spot on the wall where he’d found it, his
fingers scrabbling along the crease looking for the hole the paper
and “pen” must have come through. Eventually he found a tiny rough
gap at the base of the wall and slid the note in. The napkin caught
at the edges and he used the makeshift pen to shove it the rest of
the way through.
    Within seconds, the pen disappeared
through the wall as well.
    Nikhil sat back, waiting for a reply.
At least the scraping hadn’t been in his head. After so many weeks,
he’d begun to worry about that. He hadn’t been feeling quite right
the past few months, and when the scratching started, he was afraid
it might have been the beginning of the end. But no wonder it’d
taken this long for his new companion to dig out that hole. These
cement walls were thick – thick enough to block out most sound from
the prison around them. It’d never even occurred to Nikhil to try
to break through them.
    A long scratch broke the silence again
and a little dart of white