Dropping to my knees, I clutched the silver circle stamped into my flesh, clawing at it as my lungs struggled for air and mythoughts bled away. My eyes drifted closed as the fog came for me—the sickening, syrupy smog full of demons and nightmares.
As my shoulder smacked against the ground and I slowly passed out, fragments of the day when they’d inserted this nasty device haunted me.
It’d been a few days after my ninth birthday.
A gift I definitely didn’t want.
The sharp sting of antiseptic, followed by the bitterness of anaesthesia.
They’d buckled me down even before the drugs kicked in. The man who I’d trusted stood over me with a kind, fatherly smile, his warm, firm hands on my shoulders.
They’d cut me open—
I’d come to after surgery, finding myself in this place.
A single nurse had been allowed to tend to my wound, and a technician monitored my newly installed vitalsync core—making sure it read all my bio-data correctly. Not one of them smiled at me, touched me, talked to me.
I was just a job.
And when I was healed enough, they left.
I’d been alone ever since.
Twenty long years, I’d endured unfathomable loneliness and near-constant agony.
If they weren’t harvesting my blood through the cuffs, they were administering poison directly into my heart.
I supposed it was my fault that they kept me living in total agony.
At the beginning of my incarceration, they’d left me to my own devices.
I’d grown stronger as I grew older and I learned my prison well enough to plot my escape. I came close a couple of times. I also almost died a few times.
But when I’d woken after scaling the wall for the fifth time and noticed my hands bandaged from shredding them on broken glass, a cloud of misery soaked into my heart and never left.
Every hour, the vitalsync core fed me another droplet of poison, scrambling my nervous system and adding fuel to my hate. A constant drip of agony that kept me weak and irritable, barely able to go for a walk without my heart pounding and head swimming.
They’d won.
And somehow, two decades had passed and I no longer knew what healthy felt like. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt strong and not burning alive with torment.
Until her.
Until the moment she’d touched me and something happened.
She’d interrupted whatever method they used to keep me subservient and miserable.
And maybe, just maybe, she could be the one I’d been waiting for...
Chapter Ten
I WOKE TO DARKNESS AS ABSOLUTE as the darkness of death.
Shivering so hard my teeth chattered, my soul slowly seeped back into my body, very, very reluctantly.
Where...where am I?
Lying on icy marble and staring into pitch black, I struggled to recall—
