Then the coffin was submerged.
The first seconds were deceptive. I could still breathe, still feel the stale air trapped with me, and I wanted to believe I’d survive. Then came the trickle, cold water slipping through the vents near my head, and then the rush. The coffin filled fast, climbing my ribs, biting the air away. I thrashed, wrists tearing raw against my metal shackles, but nothing gave.
I craned my head back, blinking through the burn as water spilled into my eyes. Above me, on a glassed-in balcony, Halden stood with his arms folded, his face expressionless. He hadn’t spoken to us since that first night. Just observed us. Beside him was a figureI recognized instantly—Rafe. They had chained his wrists in front of him, but his eyes were fixed on me. He glanced at the glowing red timer on the wall, then back down at me.
In the month I’d spent with him, I’d proven my theory that he was deaf ten times over. What was strange was no one else seemed to pick up on it. Rafe was naturally so fucking quiet and brooding that Thorne and Kane didn’t even question it. Halden and his guards didn’t care either. Rafe couldn’t say, “Yes, sir,” but he could shoot a bullet through a person’s head from the top of a roof. That seemed to be good enough for Halden.
Still, I managed to understand Rafe in the ways hedidcommunicate. They were little micro expressions I had to puzzle out, but when he watched me that day, he lost control. He raised his cuffed hands and banged them once on the window, his eyes wide. It was more than he’d ever given any of us, I had no idea what it meant, and I couldn’t focus on it. Not with the water.
My chest heaved as I jerked against the restraints. My right thumb bent at a grotesque angle, sliding against bone until nausea boiled through me, and I screamed into the rising flood. Kane and I hadpracticed dislocating our joints. He was weirdly good at, sickeningly good. He could pop his arm out of its socket and thrust it back in without so much as a wince. I learned what I could when he had time to teach me, but it still hurt like a motherfucker, and I’d never attempted it while on the verge of drowning.
I shoved harder, skin splitting until my wrist tore halfway free. My lungs convulsed, begging for air, black flecks pushing at the edges of my vision. I wrenched my arms until something tore in my shoulder. Agony lit through me, but my second hand slipped loose. I clawed at the chain at my ankles, pulling and twisting. My lungs burned. My body began to spasm. I knew I was seconds from giving in, from letting the water finish what Viktor had started years ago.
And then the cuff gave.
I braced both palms against the lid, kicked with every shred of strength left in me, but it wouldn’t give.
I was going to die.
A weird feeling filtered through me. It wasn’t peace, but it also wasn’t regret. It was Finality, and she was sitting with me in that coffin, taking my hand, asking me if I wanted to give-in. I looked one last time uptoward the balcony, and I saw Rafe fighting against guards. My brows drew together, his eyes never leaving me as he’d break free long enough to physically throw himself at the window. He was bleeding, his teeth gritted, but then he saw that I was watching and he lifted his cuffed hands before bringing them down in a fist against his thigh. He kept repeating the motion, staring me down—oh, fuck.
I swiveled my body.
Of fucking course.
I kicked into the glass of the coffin. I did it again and again, cracks webbing outward until they finally gave. Jagged shards cut into my skin, but I didn’t care. Air slammed into me like a fist as I broke the surface choking. Water streamed off my hair and arms, running in silver lines down to the grate. My throat burned raw, my lungs dragging in air so fast it hurt, but I refused to cough. I refused to give them that.
A hiss cracked overhead, and then Halden’s voice filled the chamber through hidden speakers. “Take her to the deprivation chamber.”
The words echoed off the concrete, flattening the relief I’d felt in the space of a heartbeat. Hands seizedmy arms at once, rough and efficient, dragging me across the platform. My knees scraped against the grate, blood smearing through the rivulets of water as the guards hauled me upright and shoved me forward.
They marched me down a corridor, the lights buzzing faintly overhead. The concrete sweated with condensation, each drop plinking against the floor. I was bleeding, hadn’t popped my fucking fingers back into place, and shivering, soaked. They’d never taken me to any kind of deprivation chamber before. I had to assume it was the first part of month two.
We stopped at a door with no markings, just a slab of iron recessed into the wall. One guard keyed in a code, and the lock disengaged. The door opened onto blackness so absolute it looked like an endless hole carved into the cement.
Fingers dug into my bruised arms and hurled me inside. I stumbled across slick concrete, catching myself against a wall. Before I could turn, the door slammed shut.
The dark pressed in at once, thick and suffocating. There was no light or sound except the rasp of my own breath. I crouched, pressing my back to the wall, tryingto steady my pulse. My shoulders throbbed with each inhale, the pain hot and insistent where the cuffs had mangled me. I reached up and gritted my teeth as I shoved my right thumb back into its socket. The bone slid with a sickening pop that made my stomach flip.
My other hand was worse—skin shredded, joints swollen—but I forced it back into place anyway, a groan slipping through clenched teeth. I pressed both palms flat to the floor, testing them. They trembled, but they held.
My shoulder came next. I rolled it forward, then slammed it against the wall until it shifted back with a crunch that stole the air from my lungs. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek, copper flooding my mouth, but the joint held steady again.
For a second, I just knelt there in the dark, breathing around the hurt, sweat cooling on my skin. The silence magnified everything—the crackle of tendons, the tiny stutters of my breath, the shudder of my ribs.
And then I heard it—movement that wasn’t mine.
At first it was so small I thought I’d imagined it; the brush of displaced air, the soft scrape of skin against floor. But my body went rigid. Someone else was there.
“Hello?” I whispered before I could stop myself. My voice sounded wrong, devoured by the dark. I stood, wavering, and took a few steps forward. I reached out, feeling my way, jerking back suddenly when my fingers grazed warm skin.
I cried out as a body slammed forward, forearm cracking against my throat, pinning me to the wall. Pain flared through my shoulders, my head snapping back against concrete. A hand fisted in my hair, yanking hard, the weight of their body pressing me down. I gagged, trying to pinch out a scream, a word, anything to get them off me. I kicked and punched toward their torso, meeting hard, slightly wet flesh like they might’ve been in the tank, too, or bleeding. It couldn’t be one of the Creed. They wouldn’t attack me like that; they’d hear me, let me go—shit.
Rafe. It was Rafe. It had to be. He couldn’t see me, and he couldn’t hear me, and now he was going to fucking kill me.
A hard laugh of dismay scraped out of me. It was Halden’s doing—his punishment for Rafe because he helped me escape The Tank. Rafe was going to kill meout of instinct, and he’d have to live with that hanging over him the rest of his life.
There was nothing I could do. He’d never touched me before, certainly not like that. He wouldn’t recognize me. At best, he’d know it was a woman by my height, length of my hair, and the curves of my body against his, but I had no idea what Halden was doing with Rafe. For all I knew, Rafe was killing women in that chamber every day since we got to the compound.
