Location: Underground Detention Site — Eastern Wing
Time: Unknown
They took my name first.
That’s how this started.
Not the chains. Not the beatings.
The name.
“You don’t need it anymore,” the guard told me calmly as he cuffed my wrists to the wall. “No one is coming.”
They were wrong.
But I didn’t know that then.
I’ve been in this cell long enough to memorize every crack in the concrete. Long enough to know which guards shift change by the rhythm of their steps. Long enough to stop screaming because no one answers.
I was part of Ronan Pierce’s command.
That fact alone bought me a special kind of hell.
They keep me isolated—no voices, no echoes, no proof that anyone else is alive. The silence is deliberate. It presses in on you until your own thoughts start to sound like enemies.
They told me Ronan was dead during the second week.
Showed me footage.
Told me Lena died with him.
I didn’t believe them.
Not at first.
But time does terrible things to certainty.
The pain comes randomly here. Not scheduled. Not predictable. That way you never brace for it.
I’m kneeling when I hear it.
A sound that doesn’t belong.
Not a guard.
Not machinery.
Athud.
Then another.
Muffled. Distant.
Movement in the walls.
I freeze.
The sound comes again—metal shifting somewhere far away, followed by a sharp voice barking orders in Russian.
