Chapter 1
My head is clear.
That's the first thing I notice—before the concrete ceiling, before the zip ties biting into my wrists, before the thin mattress that smells like bleach and someone else's sweat. Before any of it.
My head is clear.
No fog. No fever. No slick pooling between my thighs, no desperate aching need that turns my thoughts to white noise. The heat that's been eating me alive for weeks—the waves that sent me running from the Graves estate, that put me behind the wheel of my car at midnight chasing suppressants from a stranger, that drove me straight into a trap like a deer toward headlights—is gone. Silenced. Like someone reached inside my body and flipped a switch.
I lie still and breathe.
In. Out. Slow.
And that's when I hear the screaming.
Muffled. Distant—somewhere deeper in whatever building I’m in, past walls and doors and whatever corridors separate this cell from the others. But unmistakable. A voice shredded raw, rising in pitch until it cracks into something animal, something that doesn't sound human anymore. Then itcuts off. Not tapered. Not faded. Cut—mid-scream, like someone pressed a button. Like someone put a hand over a mouth.
Or worse.
Silence. Three seconds. Four.
Then crying. Softer. Closer. Through the wall to my left—hiccupping sobs that rise and fall like someone trying to breathe through a chest full of broken glass. And from somewhere else, farther away, a low, keening whimper.
Male. Young.
And underneath all of it, barely audible—someone singing. A lullaby. A girl's voice, thin as paper, sweet and strange and horribly out of place. Like flowers growing through a crack in a tomb.
My whole body locks. Every muscle seizes, hands clenching inside the zip ties, spine rigid against the mattress. I can't move. Can't breathe. Can only lie here and listen to the sound of people breaking on the other side of concrete walls.
This is where I am.
This is real.
The ceiling is poured concrete. Unpainted. A single fluorescent tube hums behind a metal cage, throwing flat, yellow-white light that makes everything look embalmed. The walls are the same concrete—no windows, no seams. The floor: smooth, slightly sloped toward a drain in the corner. Stainless steel grate. The kind designed for easy cleaning.
I know what they need to clean.
The mattress is thin foam on a metal frame bolted to the wall. No sheets. No pillow. A rough wool blanket folded at the foot that I don't remember pulling over myself.
Someone was here before me. Someone who had this blanket and this mattress and listened to these same sounds through these same walls, and now they're gone.
The blanket stayed.
The door is steel. Heavy. There's an electronic lock—I can hear the faint buzz, a sound like a wasp trapped in a jar. No handle on this side. The hinges are internal. The door opens outward. I couldn't force it even if my hands were free.
The observer in me tries to take over—the part that notices small details, that writes them down, that turned sensory obsession into the only coping mechanism that ever actually worked. Dimensions. Maybe eight by ten. The fluorescent tube is recessed, unreachable. The drain grate is welded, not screwed. The walls are smooth, nothing to grip, nothing to pry loose. One vent near the ceiling, maybe six inches wide. Too small for anything except air.
The air itself is temperature-controlled. Cool but not cold. Precise. Calibrated for bodies that run hot.
They've thought of everything.
Whoevertheyare…
Theywon’t allow for escaping.
The clarity from my heat is a gift and a curse. I can think again—really think, not the heat-drunk fumbling of the past weeks where every thought dissolved into want and shame and more want. Where I couldn't look at Atlas without my mouth watering. Where Zero's scent turned my knees to water. Where Bane's hands on my skin short-circuited every rational thought I'd ever had. All of that is gone now, chemically scrubbed from my system, and my brain is mine again.
But it also means I canfeel.
