Page 204 of Somno Slave

Someone else swears.

Fabric pulls tight across my throat. My badge snaps against my chest. Nails scrape skin. A hand clamps around my wrist so hard my fingers go numb, and humiliation burns through the panic because my first instinct—the first filthy, traitorous instinct—is not fear.

It’s that none of them are him.

I twist against them anyway, frantic, desperate, every nerve in me screaming toward the one person I should be running from. My pulse is a living thing now, violent and wet, hammering between my ribs like it wants out. My lungs won’t fill properly. I drag air in and get almost nothing.

My head turns. I find him. He watches me like I have done something beautiful for him. And I breathe it all in.

Cold slides under my skin so fast it feels like my blood turns to needles. And then—metal.It slams into me all at once.

Chains bite hard enough to drag a sound out of me, and when I look down, my mind refuses the shape of them. They are not being placed on me. They are already there. Layered around my ribs, locked around my wrists, sunk into bruises that have yellowed at the edges. Old pain. Old metal.

I pull once, and the pain answers too quickly. I pull again, harder this time, desperate, and the pain flares properly, sharp enough to confirm it, sharp enough to ground it.

“No—”

The chain snaps taut.

“Hold her!”

“I said hold—”

“What the fuck!” The scream rips itself raw out of my throat. “Get them off me!”

My shoulder collides with stone hard enough to burst white across my vision, but it barely registers. I fight harder, wild now. Nails clawing at sleeves and skin and metal while somebody tries to pin my arms behind my back.

A hand fists into my hair. Pain tears across my scalp.

I twist on instinct and my teeth catch flesh. Then another force hits me.

A fist.

Blistering across my cheek and the crack rings through my skull.

For one strange second, everything pauses. The room tilts violently sideways. Fluorescent light smears gold across stone. My body loses itself somewhere beneath me.

I taste blood. Heat spills down my chin.

And then the floor rushes upward too fast for me to stop it.

Darkness folds over me whole.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Rheda

I come back to myself in pieces, not cleanly, not like waking, but something is shocking me in various limbs. I know something is wrong before I even open my eyes.

The pressure is the first thing. Around my wrists, across my chest, tight against my ankles, high at my throat where something cold keeps my chin lifted no matter how badly my body wants to curl away from the light. For a few seconds, I don’t understand it. My mind reaches stupidly for the bedroom, for tangled sheets and weak morning light and the damp heat of my own skin after him, but the thought collapses as soon as I try to move.

Metal answers.

Pain sparks cleanly around both wrists.

My eyes fly open and I wince as a stinging pain rocks through my eye socket. My vision throbs painfully.

The interrogation room sits around me in a hard white blur, too bright, too sterile, the ceiling lights flattening everything into the same awful colour. I blink once, twice, trying to make the room correct itself, trying to find the angle that makes this make sense. The table. The glass. The observation suite beyond it.