Barron raised his gun. Royal clenched the crowbar. Loyal didn't move. Just stared. Then the floor vibrated. One long pulse. The air thinned. Collapsed. Bled.
And as the world went white?—
As the room erupted into light and heat and end?—
I swear I heard her voice. Not begging. Not afraid. Just saying my name.
Once. Like salvation. Like damnation. Like the only thing that ever mattered.
Then
nothing.
35
CLOE
They strappedme tighter this time.
No more rope. No more half-knots that left room to twist or slide.
This time it was leather. Thick. Stiff. Fastened with buckles that groaned when tightened. My arms pulled behind me until my shoulders screamed. Ankles shackled to the legs of the chair so wide it felt deliberate, like the posture itself was meant to humiliate.
My skin stung where they’d cleaned the blood too roughly. Salt water, maybe. Something meant to disinfect. Or punish.
My hair stuck to the side of my face. My lip was split again. I could taste the iron every time I tried to swallow.
They didn’t gag me this time. Not because they were giving me kindness. Because they were waiting for the scream. I didn’t give it to them.
The room was lit from above now. Harsh. Fluorescent. Artificial to the point of cruelty. It made the concrete gleam. Made the cracks in the floor pulse like veins. Made the shadows longer than they should have been.
There were no windows. No clock. No sense of time except the way my body ached in cycles.
The light flickered.
I flinched.
Not from fear.
From instinct.
The hum of the bulb buzzed in the walls. It echoed in my skull. A white noise that filled every breath I didn’t take properly. I counted between the flickers. Between the soft scrapes of movement I heard behind the walls. Between my own shallow inhales.
Someone was watching. I knew it. I could feel it in my spine. The same way I used to feel Wolfe watching me from across the room, back when I thought his silence was the scariest thing in the world.
I would have traded this for his silence in a heartbeat. This wasn’t silence.This was theater.
The room had been cleaned. The floor scrubbed. The smell of bleach not strong enough to erase the metallic tang that lived in the corners. The chair bolted to the floor now. A camera mounted high in the corner—I only saw it because the lens caught a glint when the light above it blinked.
They weren’t hiding me anymore. They werestaging me.
My chest rose and fell in slow, even breaths. I made it do that. I made myself inhale when I wanted to choke. Exhale when I wanted to sob. Every controlled breath was another second they hadn’t taken from me.
The wound on my hip throbbed. I didn’t know if it was infected. I didn’t care. Pain was familiar. Pain I understood. Pain was the thread I followed back to myself.
My fingers were going numb. The leather bit into the nerves at my wrist. I tried to move. Just a twitch. Enough to keep blood moving. A mistake. A speaker clicked on overhead. Static. Then silence. They were listening.
I blinked up at the camera. Didn’t flinch. Let them watch. Let them see what I looked like after Wolfe put a collar around my throat and taught me to kneel. Let them see who they took.Because I wasn’t prey. Not anymore.
