I settle back on the bed again and press a trembling hand over my heart. My pulse refuses to slow, my entire body wired and alive for the first time since the crash.
I have something now. A way out. A way to get Leo back.
It isn’t much, but it’s more than I’ve had before. A choked sound escapes me, half-sob, half-disbelieving chuckle. I press the heel of my hand over my mouth, trying to quiet myself on the off-chance another guard comes around to check on me.
A plan is already being woven inside my head.
I’ll get us out of here even if it kills me.
The next morning,I don’t resist when they come in.
I hear them before I see them—boots against concrete, keys jangling, the low murmur of voices just outside my door. The click of the lock disengaging is practiced, a familiar alarm I’ve grown used to by now.
I make it easy for them.
When the door swings open, I keep my head down, my eyes fixed on my lap. I don’t speak. I don’t even fight when their hands close around my arms and drag me out of bed like dead weight. My limbs stay loose and compliant as I’m manhandled out into the hallway.
I let them believe I’ve stopped trying, that the fight’s been bled out of me. As long they believe the isolation and the hunger have finally broken me, they’ll let their guard down.
Faking it isn’t that hard, anyway.
To my surprise, they drag me into another room. Not the infirmary or the shower room but one where the lights are harsher. It smells faintly familiar but for some reason, I can’t place where I know it from. I’m forced down into a chair that sits behind a long, metal table bolted to the floor.
I blink slowly, letting my lashes flutter heavily like it takes effort to hold them open. There isn’t much to look at other than the table in front of me. Over by the door is another chair, dragged there to be some kind of observer over the room.
One of the guards steps forward, a younger man with flat, gray eyes and the kind of permanent, disinterested frown only someone paid to watch suffering without blinking could wear. He crouches in front of me with slow, easymovement, his expression barely shifting as he reaches for the cuff around my wrists.
He clips one end of it to a steel loop bolted beneath the table, the metal clinking softly as it locks in place. His fingers brush my skin by accident, and I flinch before I can stop myself.
If he notices, he says nothing.
When he’s done, he rests an arm on his knee, staying close but just out of reach where I could swing a fist at him. It’s a calculated move, one I’m sure has been done consciously.
His voice is soft, almost conversational when he speaks. “Well. Look who finally cracked.”
I don’t answer. I keep my eyes fixed on my lap.
He chuckles low in his throat, leaning back just slightly. “I heard you want to speak to Mikhail. Is this true?”
His tone is still light, but there’s something sharper beneath it now, a weight behind the question that makes my stomach twist.
It seems I’m being put to another test. Though for what reason, I can’t even begin to guess.
Mikhail already told me to go to hell by making it abundantly clear he doesn’t negotiate. That he doesn’t care whether I live or die or whether anyone else here does either, for that matter. So what’s the point in dragging this out? In rubbing salt into wounds that are already raw and festering? What point is left to prove when I’ve already shown them what they wanted to see? That I’m broken beyond repair.
It doesn’t escape me that this might not be about strategy at all. It might just be about cruelty. And if there’sanyonewho’d orchestrate an entire charade just for the pleasure of watching someone squirm, it’s Mikhail. He doesn’t need a reason. Sadism is his baseline. He enjoys turning pain into performance.
Still,I nod anyway because what’s the alternative? If they’re moving me around by taking me to a different room to be questioned again, or paraded in front of another face I haven’t seen before, then something on the outside is shifting.
Even the smallest shift in routine could mean something.Anything.
The guard lifts himself back onto his feet. He crosses the room in a few strides, boots echoing softly off the concrete floor, then disappears through the heavy door with a mutedclickas it seals behind him.
I stay still, breathing slowly while counting each second in my head just to keep from unraveling. Three minutes pass, maybe four, and then he’s back.
But this time, he isn’t empty-handed.
He returns carrying something bulky and ominous—a black, boxy handset tethered to a large square encryption unit. Wires coil from the receiver to the machine in a tangled, almost colorful pattern, like someone tried to make it less threatening by giving it bright cords.