“Eventually.” His voice carried no more weight on the word than if he'd been discussing the weather. “But not until Luka has watched you break. Not until everyone he's promised to protect understands that the promise was always conditional.” He crouched beside me, eye level now, close enough that I could see how completely unbothered he was by any of this. “You're not dying today, Troy. You're not dying tomorrow. You're going to stay alive just long enough for everyone who loves you to destroy themselves trying to reach you.”
I turned my face away.
He grabbed my jaw and turned it back.
“Assuming Declan survived the explosion,” Rafael said, and his voice never changed register at all. “You didn't see what happened after they took you. You didn't see how much blood there was. You didn't see whether Dmitri reached him in time or whether he was still lying on that floor when the fire reached his side of the arena.”
“You're lying.”
“Am I?” He released my jaw and stood. “Or am I simply saying the thing you've been trying not to think about since you woke up?”
He was right. That was the worst part. He wasn't lying. He was saying the exact thing that had been sitting in my chest since I'd opened my eyes in this room, the exact fear I'd been breathing around, carefully, the way you breathe around a wound you can't afford to probe.
“Love makes people legible,” Rafael said, moving toward the door. “It makes your decisions obvious and your weak points visible and your breaking point findable for anyone who knows where to look. Luka loved his authority more than he loved loyalty. And you—” he paused with his hand on the door “—you love Declan more than you love your own survival. Which means you'll endure everything that happens in this room as long as you believe there's a chance he's alive. And that makes you exactly as useful as I need you to be.”
He knocked twice on the door. It opened.
The two men came back in with the bucket and the towel and the same blank professionalism as before, and Rafael walked out without looking back, and the door closed, and the room was exactly the same size it had been before but felt smaller.
The towel came down over my face.
The water came.
They did it four more times. Maybe five. I lost the count somewhere between the third and fourth session when my brain stopped being able to hold onto numbers, stopped being able to hold onto much of anything except the cycling animal terror and the few seconds of air between sessions that felt like gifts I hadn't earned. Each time they stopped, the silence was almost worse. My body wouldn't stop shaking. My lungs kept searching for danger that had briefly paused rather than ended.
By the time they finally left, I was lying in a puddle of my own making, teeth chattering, ribs aching from the convulsions, something in my wrists that had gone from pain to a low persistent throb that meant the skin had split at some point and I'd stopped noticing.
The room was very quiet.
I stared at the ceiling and let myself do the thing I'd been refusing to do since I woke up. I thought about Declan. Not strategically, not as a variable in the problem of getting out ofhere. Just him. The specific weight of him when he pulled me close. The way his voice changed when he was choosing words carefully. The particular steadiness of his hands, which had always known exactly what they were doing.
Rafael wanted me to understand that loving him had made me weak. Had made both of us into targets. Had given someone a road map to everything that could be used against us.
And maybe that was true. Maybe love was exactly the liability he described, the soft place in the armor that every enemy eventually found.
But lying on the floor of a concrete room in the dark, soaked and shaking and not knowing if the person I loved was alive or dead, I found that I didn't particularly care whether love was a weakness or not.
I wanted him alive. That was all. It was the only thing that felt solid in the room, the only thing that wasn't fog and cold and Rafael's voice working its patient damage.
He was alive. I had to believe that. And if he was alive, he was coming.
That was the thing Rafael hadn't accounted for. He'd built his plan around love making people reckless and legible and breakable.
He hadn't considered that it also made them relentless.
I closed my eyes. I let the exhaustion drag me under. I held onto the one thing in the room that was mine.
His face. His hands. His voice saying my name like it meant something.
Whatever came next, I'd still be here when it did.
TWENTY-SIX
NO AIR LEFT
DECLAN
The man was bleeding from his nose, and one of his eyes had swollen shut, but he still wouldn't talk.
