Maybe I was just a girl in over her head. A girl with scars, both earned and inherited. A girl trained to read shadows but too foolish to see through a man like him. A girl stupid enough to think just being me was enough.
I shift on the concrete floor, pain blooming sharp along my ribs. Everything aches. My mouth is dry, swollen. I think my shoulder is dislocated. It crunches when I breathe, a grinding, nauseating sensation that refuses to fade into the background. It’s all blurred together—the interrogations, the boots in my ribs, the questions asked in Russian and English and then Russian again, like repetition might wear us down. Neither of us has said a word to them. I think that’s the only reason they keep us alive. For now.
I swallow the metallic tang in my mouth and glance at King.
“I’m going to die in here, aren’t I?” I whisper.
He doesn’t look up. “No. But if you keep talking, you might speed it up.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “You used to like when I talked.”
“Yeah, well,” he grits out, lifting his head enough to look at me, “this isn’t the time to rediscover yourself. Save it. Stay silent. It’s the only thing you’ve got left.”
That stings more than it should. But he’s not wrong.
I press my head back against the wall and close my eyes. Silence has always been the safest part of me, even when it never felt natural. When I was a little girl, I used to talk to fill the quiet, to chase away the weight in the room when my father came home after long stretches away. But he’d hush me, always so gentle but so firm. “Some things are not meant to be spoken about,” he’d say, brushing a kiss to my forehead. “Not at school. Not with friends. Not even to your mother unless I say.”
I grew up in the kind of house where every word was measured. Polished. Quiet. Our curtains were always pressed. Silverware laid out precisely. I wore hair bows and ballet flats and always smiled when spoken to. I had the kind of mother who taught me how to fold napkins for dinner parties and the kind of father who could kill a man with his hands and be back in time for family breakfast. The military wasn’t a legacy I stumbled into—it was a shadow that followed me into every room.
They told me to be good. To be small. To be still.
Eventually, I became the girl they wanted. I stopped asking why my dad came home with blood under his fingernails or why there were always late-night calls in languages I didn’t understand. I learned how to hold a weapon before I learned how to kiss a boy. And when I finally got old enough to earn my place in their world, I stopped talking altogether.
Because silence was power.
But silence feels different here. In this place, silence doesn’t protect me; it just echoes. It bounces off the walls and comes back heavier, loaded with all the words I’m not allowed to say.
I open my eyes again, taking in a shaky breath. My vision is blurred, always hazy, like the air itself doesn’t want to let me see clearly. I stare at King, who is watching me through the slits of his bruised eyes, his expression unreadable.
“You were gone,” he says quietly.
“What?”
“In your head. Checked out. Just like that.” He snaps a broken finger against his thigh. The sound is dull, but the intention is sharp. “I hate when you do that.”
Irritation swells within me like a wildfire. “Well, forgive me if I’m not doing the silence thing the way you’d like. I wasn’t trained to get caught.”
“Neither was I,” he mutters.
The silence stretches again.
He shifts, groaning softly, adjusting his posture as if even sitting is a struggle against his body. “He’s coming, you know.”
I don’t answer.
Because I don’t believe it.
Because if he were coming, he wouldn’t have sent someone else. He wouldn’t have let me rot while his voice came through King’s earpiece like some ghost—calm, collected, cold. He wouldn’t have allowed me to think, even for a second, that I was expendable.
My jaw clenches. I dig my nails into my palms and force myself upright. Every joint screams, but I refuse to stop. I won’t. I begin counting the cracks in the ceiling, mapping the angles of the cell, and listening to the patterns of the guards’ boots outside. Left. Right. Pause. Turn. Door. There’s a rhythm to everything, even this.
I’m not going to wait for Jonathan Cash to save me. Not this time. Not when I can save myself. Not when he made it so easy to believe I mattered—and then proved I didn’t.
I tuck my chin down, pull my knees to my chest, and start planning despite the protest in my shoulders from the tension I’m putting on my arms. Every breath hurts, but every breath is proof I still have something to fight with.
And this time, I don’t say a word.
Chapter 5
