“Your silence wastes us both time,” he says, as if we haven’t had this conversation a hundred times already. “Tell me your bloodline, girl, and I’ll make it easy.”
Easy. The word punches through me harder than his fists. Nothing here will ever be easy.
My throat feels raw when I rasp back, “You want easy? Hire a secretary to bone. I’m not giving you shit.”
The blow is quick, open-handed across my cheek this time, snapping my head sideways. The sting radiates across my skin, but it’s thedismissivenessof it that makes my fangs ache. The contempt.
My laugh scrapes out weaker than I want. “Running out of creative juices? What’s next, a paper cut?”
He doesn’t answer, but the scalpel does, parting through my cheek and into my mouth in one clean line. Heat blooms and blood slips fast down my face, trailing onto my body and the floor below.
My hiss of agonizing pain falters halfway through from what I see past Terrance and his self-satisfied smirk.
Callum.
He’s stationed by the wall as usual, arms crossed, posture rigid. Same as yesterday, same as the day before that. But when the scalpel bites deeper into me, his hands tighten against his biceps before he drops them to his sides and works them in and out of balled fists.
My heart slams harder than the pain itself warrants, because he looks…angry?
He looks straight ahead, still, and in an instant, he’s back to being the mirror of Elias’s perfect calm.
Maybe I imagined it. Maybe Iwantto imagine it. In this endless loop of white walls, piercing light, and my pain, even the shadow of someone giving a shit about me feels like a chance at freedom.
Darkness swallows me again after the hours slip by.
When I surface next, it isn’t under the white lights or with Terrance’s beady eyes on me.
It’s my cell reflecting back at me. The sterile walls press in close, the air heavy with the faint chemical tang of the sedative mist still bleeding through the vents.
For a moment, I lie there confused, cheek pressed against the cold floor, until I realize what dragged me up from sleep.
Hunger.
It gnaws hollow and endless, sharper than pain, deeper than a regular thirst. My gums ache, fangs nudging down as if they might tear their way free without permission. The blood bags piled near the fake wall are emptied, drained, and thrown carelessly aside.
Thin smears of red cling to plastic, dry and useless.
I crawl toward them anyway. My fingers scrape the floor as if the bags might miraculously fill again if I touch them. I press one to my lips, desperate enough to bite, but it’s empty, always empty, and the plastic crunches against my teeth until frustration snarls out of me.
The mist hisses faintly overhead, steady and constant, keeping my body too heavy to rise, too weak to even pound the wall for attention. It presses in with its false calm, an invisible leash that keeps me subdued even when I want to claw the world apart.
I slump back, bags scattered from my hands, and force myself to focus on breathing.
For a sliver of a moment, I imagine my father’s voice calling me for our family morning meeting to talk about what we have planned for the day, my mother’s hand brushing a stray lock of hair from my face as she passed behind my chair. My chest twists with the thought.
The memory fades, swallowed by the steady hum of the mist.
Sleep takes me again.
This time when I awaken to the bright lights, I don’t even bother testing the restraints. My wrists are already swollen frommy body not healing as fast anymore. I keep my eyes on the ceiling and let him circle, let him ask his questions, let his hands and his blades do their work.
I don’t answer at all. Not even having the energy to retort.
His blows land anyway. My skin splits. My blood drips. The words “What are you? What bloodline gave you this?”scrape the air again and again. I let them pass over me, trying to ignore the way the same repeated questions are starting to feel like torture themselves.
But I do notice Callum again.
His hands are rigid at his sides, fists clenched so tightly the bulging veins of his forearms stand out starkly against his skin. His chest heaves too fast, the rise and fall betraying rage, or grief, or both.
