She turns for the door. Finally, the sane part of me catches up and I realize I need todosomething. I have to get out of here. That part lurches forward.
"Wait." My voice comes out wrecked. Gravel and rust. "Where am I? Why am I here?”
My body feels fuzzy as I pull my legs under myself to try and get up.
“You can't just—I have a family. People will be looking for me. You can't just take someone and—"
The shaved-head guard moves off the wall. One step. That's all it takes. His hand closes around my jaw—not squeezing, just holding, fingers clamping my mouth shut mid-sentence. My teeth click together. The words die.
He leans in close. His breath smells like black coffee and rot.
"Next time you open your mouth without being asked a question," he says, "we put something in it. Understand?"
He holds my jaw for three seconds. Four. Making sure the message sets. Then he lets go, and my head snaps back, and I taste copper where my teeth cut the inside of my cheek.
The nurse doesn't look back. Doesn't slow down. She walks out like nothing happened—because to her, nothing did.
This is Tuesday.
The guards hover for a bit longer. The shaved-head one leans back against the door frame, arms crossed, watching me the way a cat watches a mouse it's not hungry enough to eat yet. The other stands by the door.
I press my bound hands against the back of my head. My fingers come away smeared with pink. Not a lot. But the message is clear.We decide what happens to your body now. Compliance is not optional. It's physics.
Then the guards leave. The lock buzzes. The wasp in the jar.
And finally I can breathe again.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and the tears come—leaking out like something broken, running down my face because I can't wipe them properly with my wrists zip-tied together. They drip off my chin onto my shirt—the same shirt I was wearing when I snuck out of the Graves house. The same one that still carries traces ofthem—cedar and gunpowder and amber—soaked into the fabric from days of living intheirorbit, breathingtheirair, sleeping in a room saturated withtheir scent.
I didn't say goodbye. Didn't leave a note. Just shoved clothes into a duffel and slipped out like the foster kid I've always been, one bag packed, ready to disappear.
I was running.
And then I was caught.
Think. Don't feel. Think.
I try. I count things—the flicker rate of the fluorescent tube, the intervals between the sobs through the walls, my own heartbeats. The lullaby has started again—that thin, sweet voice singing to no one, or to everyone, the only gentle sound in a building designed to erase gentleness. I run the dimensions of the cell again, looking for something I missed. There's nothing. The same eight-by-ten box. The same welded drain. The same dead air.
I don't know how long I sit there—minutes, hours, some gray space between where time has no edges—before the lock buzzes again.
This time, it's not guards.
The man who enters is mid-fifties, lean, well-dressed in a way that screams money and taste. Charcoal suit, no tie, the collar open to show a tanned throat. His shoes are Italian leather—I notice because they're absurd in this concrete box, gleaming under the fluorescent light like artifacts from a different reality. His watch is a Patek Philippe. Nautilus, gold face, the kind thatcosts more than most people's cars. I know this because I spent a summer shelving books on luxury goods at Cornerstone, and I read everything I shelved.
He looks at me—the tears on my face, the blood drying in my hair, the zip ties—and his expression doesn't change. Warm. Interested. Appraising. Like the evidence of violence is just part of the décor.
"Max Carter." He says my name like he's tasting it. "I'm Ellis. May I sit?"
He gestures at the end of the mattress. Like this is a social call. Like we're about to have coffee.
I say nothing.
He sits anyway. Crosses one leg over the other, adjusts the crease in his trousers. His cologne is subtle—sandalwood, something citrus. Expensive. The scent sits wrong in this room, too civilized for a concrete cell with a drain in the floor. Like a silk handkerchief draped over a coffin.
"I imagine you have questions," he says. His accent is East Coast—polished, educated, the kind of voice that went to Exeter or Andover and never quite shed the vowels. "I find it's better to address them early. Reduces anxiety."
My hands won't stop shaking. I press them together between my knees, zip ties digging into skin, and try to hold still. Try to look like I'm not one loud noise away from shattering.
