I hold the gaze for a beat and then turn my back to the glass. The reflection still catches the edge of my gaze as I do, showing the red ink etched into my skin. A serpent winding across the entirety of my back.
I swallow the emotion that always wells up at the sight of it. The artwork was my choice, months later, when the wounds had finally closed, I buried them beneath scales. It was the only way I knew to take my body back, by covering the reminders my father left.
To turn his punishment into something I could claim. A snake for survival. A predator that sheds its skin and keeps living.
But I still remember what lies beneath, from the night I tried to run from this place. He beat me to death’s doorstep, every strike branding me with the truth of this place.
The screams in the cells.
The experiments in the labs.
The torture he conducts as easily as breathing.
I stare at the serpent winding across my back until the steam fogs the glass and the reflection blurs. The ink may cover the scars, but it doesn’t erase them. Nothing can.
Whatever warmth had flickered within me earlier is extinguished the moment I recall what happens when I allow myself to hope. I tried once to claw free of this life.
So I let the heaviness settle back into me, cold and familiar, and my only path to survival.
Hope here isn’t a path to freedom…it’s the quickest path to death.
CHAPTER 13
BRIAR
The hiss of air releasing the mist always comes before the dark.
By now I logically know better than to waste strength clawing at the air to escape it, but instinct doesn’t care about logic. My chest locks, my fingernails scrape against the metal table until they split, and then the mist takes me anyway.
When I wake again, the world is white lights beaming down on me in the same sterile, cold room. Back where my last conscious moment was.
The lights sear down, so bright they feel baked into my skull. Cold presses up through the metal table beneath me, metal cuffs cinched so tight my wrists are nothing but throbbing pulses at the ends of my arms. I test them anyway, because fighting is the only thing that reminds me I’m still alive.
Terrance, as I’ve come to hear his name repeatedly after telling him never hearing it means it doesn’t matter, is already here. He’s always here.
The rhythm of his footsteps circles me, slow and deliberate, like a predator toying with prey that can’t run. “Tell me what you are, Briar,” he murmurs, voice low and obsessive.
I force a fanged smirk to the surface.
“I thought it would be obvious by now, but I’m a vampire, Terrance.” My voice is hoarse, edged with a laugh I don’t feel as extreme hunger pulls at my stomach.
I don’t remember ever eating and I haven’t seen any empty bags lately, with always being put under if I’m not in this damn room. It’s possible I’m still feeding while unconscious since that’s what I saw before, but the ache and constant fatigue makes me doubt it.
Unless I truly am under that much stress with repairing my body each and every fucking day because of this sadistic bastard.
He hums as if considering my retort. Then his knuckles connect with my newly healed ribcage that’s still brittle after healing yesterday's lung puncture. Air rushes from my lungs in a ragged wheeze.
“There’s still nothing like using one’s own hands,” he muses, flexing his knuckles like he’s cataloguing the feel of my bones under them.
I choke on the breath clawing its way back into me, “I mean, you still punch like a bitch, so I guess to each their own?”
His smile slants, sharper than the scalpel he plucks from the tray.
And the every day cycle begins again until I’m left barely clinging to consciousness, the pain threatening to pull me under atop the loss of blood.
The hiss comes. Then the dark.
When I wake, it once again feels like I never left the table at all.
