I didn't know if he was alive. I'd been taken before I could know, and the not knowing was already starting to do the work that the chains couldn't.
I forced myself to breathe. Slow and even, pulling air into the bottom of my lungs the way I'd been trained to, the way that keeps panic from becoming the only thing in the room. If I was breathing, they wanted me alive. If they wanted me alive, I had time. Time meant options, and options meant I needed to think instead of spiral into the images my brain kept throwing at me — Declan on that floor, the blood, the stillness.
I pressed my jaw against my shoulder and breathed until my pulse dropped back below a shout.
Footsteps in the corridor outside.
I let my head fall to the side and made my breathing shallow and slow. The door opened with a metallic screech that went straight through my back teeth.
Two men walked in. I didn't recognize them, but the way they moved said the same things about them that the men atthe arena had said. One carried a bucket. The other had a folded towel draped over his arm.
My stomach dropped.
I'd seen enough interrogation footage to know what that combination meant before they'd taken three steps into the room.
“He's awake,” the first one said.
“Good.” The second one stood over me, and his face held nothing at all, no satisfaction, no discomfort, no curiosity. Just the expression of a man doing a job. “Boss said to start without him.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at them. “Fuck you.”
He smiled with only his mouth. “Save your breath.”
They were practiced at it. One grabbed my head and forced it back while the other laid the towel across my face and the world collapsed into wet fabric pressing over my nose and mouth, into darkness that smelled like mildew, and then the water came.
It was cold and it was endless and it didn't care.
My body stopped listening to me within seconds. Every rational thought drowned under the screaming of nerve endings that had one message on repeat: you are dying, you are dying, you are dying. My lungs convulsed trying to find air that wasn't there. My back arched against the chains hard enough to feel the steel cut through skin. I heard sounds coming from somewhere and it took several seconds to understand they were coming from me.
The animal part of my brain took over and the rest of me went somewhere it couldn't follow.
Then it stopped.
They ripped the towel away and I gasped, convulsed, coughed up water that tasted like copper and felt like fire. My whole body shook with the kind of shaking that comes from terror rather than cold, the deep muscular tremors that don'trespond to willpower because they're not coming from anything willpower can reach.
“That's one,” the first man said, completely calm.
I couldn't answer. My lungs were still trying to remember what air was supposed to feel like.
The second man checked his watch. “Thirty seconds.”
I used every one of them to try to pull myself back together, to find the floor under my back and the chains at my wrists and anything solid enough to anchor me in my own body. It barely worked. The animal terror was still sitting in my chest like a stone and it wasn't interested in logic.
“Wait.”
The voice came from the doorway. Smooth, familiar, wrong in a way that reached further than the waterboarding.
Rafael stepped into the light.
He was dressed like he was going to a meeting. Collar straight, cuffs precise, not a single thing about him that acknowledged where he was or what had just happened in this room. He looked at me the way a man looks at a project he's pleased with.
“Troy.” He said my name like we were running into each other somewhere normal. “I'm glad you're awake. We have a great deal to discuss.”
I spat water at his feet.
“Leave us,” he said to the two men, without looking at them.
They went without hesitating. The door closed.
