He doesn’t speak, but I see the questions in his gaze.
Are you okay? Did they touch you? Did they find out more than they should?
I blink once. That’s all he gets. One answer. It has to be enough.
The Russians shout back and forth, arguing about who calls it in and what to do now that they have two. I hear the word “Greenport” again. I hear my father’s name, spit out like a curse. They know King’s one of theirs. They’re salivating with the leverage. They think they’ve won.
But none of that lands as hard as the hollow that’s opened up inside me.
Jon didn’t come.
And now I’m not sure if I want him to.
Because I’m not sure what’s worse—dying here with all this silence inside me… or living long enough to realize I imagined everything that ever passed between us.
Chapter 4
Delilah Barrinheart
The air stinks of rot.
Not just from the blood in the concrete or the iron tang of rusted metal chains. It’s something deeper. Older. The kind of decay that lingers when hope has died and stayed dead long enough to sour. It crawls into your nose and settles at the back of your throat until every breath feels like swallowing something that used to be alive.
I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what time it is. There’s no window in this cell—no sun to crawl across the floor, no moonlight to sneak in and whisper that I’ve made it through another night. Only the fluorescent hum from a dying bulb overhead, flickering like it’s as tired as we are. Sometimes it buzzes louder right before it dims, and I imagine it’s deciding whether or not to give up.
It’s just me and King. Both still here, still breathing, still bleeding—barely.
He hasn’t spoken since they threw him back in with me. He sits against the opposite wall, one arm limp against his side, the other resting across his bent knee. He hasn’t moved in hours.Maybe longer. Time lost all shape two or three tortures ago, melted together into one long stretch of pain and waiting.
I shift just enough to pull at the chains around my wrists. The scrape of metal against bone is the only confirmation I have that I’m still in my body. Everything else feels as though it’s floating above me—detached and cold, like I’m watching myself from somewhere near the ceiling. There’s a gash along my ribs that I haven’t looked at yet, and a busted lip whose taste I can still sense every time I breathe through my mouth. My jaw aches. My right eye keeps wanting to swell shut. I’ve forgotten the origins of most of the bruises that mark my skin.
But I’m still here.
I glance at King. It takes me a moment to realize what’s different. What’s wrong…
The mask is gone.
I think it was ripped away during one of the interrogations, probably used to soak up the blood from the fresh split in his cheek when they threw the lamp at him for laughing after I spat on their boots. That was the last time we were allowed to be together during an interrogation. Now they only take him back when they want answers they won’t get.
Where’s Greenport? Who’s leading it? Who’s tracing us? What’s the layout? Are others coming?
Questions on repeat. Always the same. They circle the same drain, getting more desperate each time they realize we’re not going to give them what they want.
He sits slumped, barely breathing, one boot missing and the other barely laced. His clothes are torn and caked in blood, most of it likely not his. But it’s his face that takes my breath away.
I’ve never seen it before. Not once. Not in all those years of training sessions, debriefings, or offhand encounters on base, where he always lurked in the background like a shadow with orders. He wore that black carbon-fiber mask like a second skin,like armor. Like he’d welded it to his bones. Now, stripped of it, he looks like someone entirely different.
He’s younger than I expected—mid-thirties, perhaps. Early thirties, if you consider the damage he’s endured. His features are sharp and brutal—high cheekbones, a broken Roman nose that healed incorrectly, and a jaw so square it looks as if it was carved from stone. A scar splits through his left eyebrow and curves downward, almost reaching his cheekbone, standing out against the blood-streaked grime. His lips are chapped, split open at the center. There’s another scar curving beneath his ear, half-hidden beneath a week’s worth of unshaven stubble, like someone tried to cut his throat once and failed.
But it’s his eyes that steal the breath from my lungs. They are the color of old gunmetal—storm gray, unreadable, relentless. The kind of eyes that have seen too much yet keep seeing anyway. Yet, there’s a flicker there, something human buried beneath the wreckage, like a dim pilot light that refuses to go out.
I don’t know what I expected—perhaps a monster or a machine. Some faceless executioner made entirely of bone and rage. But this—this is a man. A wrecked, dangerous man. A beautiful one, too, in a way that only ruins can be. Not because he’s conventionally handsome, but because there’s no pretense left in him. No mask to hide behind anymore. No distance. Just raw, unedited damage.
And for the first time since we were thrown in here together, I don’t feel like I’m locked in a cell with a ghost.
I feel like I’m staring at the last version of a man who’s been burned alive and kept walking anyway.
And now I can’t stop looking.
