They walk me through corridors. Concrete under my feet. The air is cool, sterile, carrying the faint chemical smell of industrial cleaner. I hear doors opening. Locks buzzing. The sound of this place—the one Max has been living in for days—settles around me like a second blindfold.
A door opens. Hands push me through. Not gently.
"Your friend is inside. The blindfold stays on until we leave."
The door closes. The lock buzzes.
Until we leave. They're gone.
I hook my bound hands under the bottom edge of the blindfold and shove it up. It catches on my brow, drags across my forehead, and I wrench it over my head with a grunt. It falls to the floor.
I blink.
The room is dim—a single fluorescent tube behind a metal cage, casting flat yellow-white light that makes everything look dead. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. A thin mattress on a bolted frame. A drain in the corner.
And Max.
He's on the floor against the far wall, knees drawn up, completely naked. Strewn across the bed are what looks like scrubs—thin, gray, too big for him. His wrists are bruised and raw from cuffs that they must have forgotten to put back on him. His head is down.
I stand there for half a second. Just looking at him. Taking in the reality of what I walked into.
Then I hear his breathing. Fast. Shallow. Panicked. Muffled by the leather strapped over his mouth.
Max is still gagged.
The rage that moves through me is so total it burns through the sedative like acid through gauze. They put him on a cross. They whipped him. They forced his heat. They made him perform for an audience. And when they were done—when the show was over and the wall went dark—they threw him back in this box naked with the leather still buckled around his skull and didn't even give him back his voice.
I will remember that. I will remember every detail of this, and when the time comes, I will present the bill.
"Max." I keep my voice steady. Low. The fluorescent light is dim and flat and makes everything look worse—the bruises darker, the skin paler, the gag a strip of black leather cutting across his face. "It's me. It's Bane."
A muffled sound. Not a word. Something that might have been my name if his mouth could form it. Then silence. Then the breathing gets faster—not calming down, speeding up. Like hearing my voice made it worse. Like being rescued is its own kind of breaking.
I drop to my knees. The concrete is cold through my pants. I reach out with bound hands—slow, careful—and touch his shoulder. His bare skin too pale. He flinches under my touch so violently his whole body jerks away and his back hits the wall. His eyes—wide, glassy, animal-terrified—stare at me over the gag like he's not sure whether I'm real or another thing this place has invented to hurt him.
Something white-hot moves through my chest. Not the flinch itself—the meaning of it. They’ve taught him to flinch from hands in the dark. They’ve turned touch into threat. And now I can see what they've done—the flush on his skin, the tremblingthat hasn't stopped, the way he's holding himself like everything hurts.
"It's me." Softer now. "It's just me. I'm not going to hurt you."
Nobody is. Not while I'm breathing. Not while I have a body to put between you and them.
I follow the flinch. Find his shoulder again. Trail my fingers up—carefully, slowly, letting him watch my hands move so he knows where I'm going. My fingertips find the edge of a welt. Raised. Hot. Running diagonally across his shoulder blade as he leans forward. Then another one below it, intersecting. I see them now in the flat light—angry red lines, the deeper ones dark and split.
My jaw locks so hard it aches.
I catalog them by touch. Two welts on his upper back. A third lower, deeper—the skin broken, tacky with dried blood. A bruise on his ribs that makes him hiss when my fingers brush it. His skin is hot everywhere—residual heat, suppressants fighting biology—and damp with sweat.
I find the leather strap of the gag.
The buckle is behind his head. I can see the strap but my fingers are thick and clumsy with the sedative, the zip ties limiting my range. I fumble with the metal. Curse. Try again. The buckle is small and my hands are unsteady from the fury pounding through me, and the leather is wet—tears or sweat or both—and I can feel Max trembling under my fingers. His whole body vibrating like a plucked string.
"Come on. Come on,come on—"
The buckle gives. The strap loosens. I pull the gag free and Max gasps—a raw, desperate intake of air, the sound of someone surfacing after too long underwater. Then another breath. And another. Each one a ragged sob that shakes his whole frame.
"Bane?"
My name in his mouth. Broken. Incredulous. Like he's not sure I'm real.
