She’s gone.Signs of abduction.Blood at the scene.
The response came almost immediately.
Understood.
He looked back at the mirror one last time, at the desperate plea etched into glass.
“You’re not alone,” he said quietly, as if she could hear him across the city.“Not anymore.”
Outside, the rain thickened, washing the city in silver and shadow.
And the Lions began the hunt.
****
Darkness pressed infrom every side.
Not the clean kind.Not night.This was enclosed darkness, thick and close, the kind that swallowed sound and made it hard to tell where her body ended and the room began.
Sienna Maddox lay curled on her side, cheek pressed to cold concrete, every breath shallow and measured because anything deeper made her ribs scream.Pain radiated through her in slow, pulsing waves—her shoulder, her head, the raw slice along her forearm where blood had dried sticky against her skin.
She was alive.
For now.
The room smelled wrong.Metal and chemicals and old fear soaked into stone.Somewhere nearby, machinery hummed—low, constant, patient.Waiting.
Chimera.
She didn’t know how she knew.
Only that the word had surfaced in fragments during the days before she was taken.In files that didn’t want to be found.In conversations that ended too abruptly.In eyes that watched her a second too long when she asked the wrong questions.
They hadn’t come like amateurs.
The memory came back in brutal flashes.
Her apartment door splintering inward.Hands on her, too strong, moving too fast.Someone telling her to be smart, to help shape the narrative, to use her face and her voice to mislead the public.
She’d fought.
Of course she had.
The mirror.The sink.Her own blood slicking her fingers as she wrote the only thing that mattered.
Help me.Please.
The words had blurred as her vision tunneled, but she’d finished them anyway.She’d needed to believe someone would come.Someone who knew how to read the signs.
A sound broke through her thoughts—footsteps, distant but deliberate.
Sienna stilled, every muscle locking tight.She forced herself not to whimper, not to give them the sound they wanted.Fear clawed at her throat, sharp and relentless, but beneath it burned something hotter.
Defiance.
They thought they could use her.
They thought they could turn her into a mouthpiece, twist truth into distraction.