“I’m sorry.” Wetness on my face. “I’m so sorry, Bea.”
Pepe crawls across the ground towards me, the words broken and guttural. “Your fault.”
And there are others, too. Other voices, all of them fighting for space inside my head. Ripping my soul to pieces.
***
Something is wrong with me.
I can’t open my eyes. Can’t lift my hands.
People are talking around me, muttering.
“…too much.” I recognise that voice, nasally and sharp, and try to twist away from it. “Bring her out of it.”
Reed.
“You’re lucky she’s not dead. There could be long-term effects, but we won’t know yet.”
“You created the dosage.” Salvatore. He sounds angry. “Bring her around, then.”
Stefano.
I try to form the words, but only a mumble comes out, jumbled letters that sound nothing like what I’m trying to say.
Where is he?
Day 90 - Stefano
“You threw it all away,nipote.”
My uncle lingers at the front of the cage, his arms threaded through the bars as he leans his elbows on the iron strip. It runs horizontally to the solid metal bars, bars that keep me here.
From my own position against the far steel wall, I stare through him.
“Don’t you want to know how long it’s been?” He tilts his head. “Quite a while.”
I know exactly how long it has been. Know the routine of the guards that toss food through the bars, the girls that move in and out of the cages around me with dead, lifeless eyes.
“Forty-six days.” The words are hoarse, gruff from disuse.
Forty-six days since they separated us. And Cat… I know well enough what has happened to her, in the days since.
Dried blood still cakes my hands from trying to break through those bars to get to her as I waited for them to finish it, to come back and put a bullet in my head.
Instead, they left me.
Not dead after all. Just… forgotten. Left to rot down here.
I would choose death, if they offered it.
He studies me. “You seem remarkably well-adjusted, considering. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. You would have made an excellent heir, if you had been raised correctly from the beginning.”
“There isnothingwrong with the way I was raised.”
He snorts.
“How is Iliana?” I keep my words as level as possible.
