Page 211 of Somno Slave

My voice shakes harder. My whole body does.

“I watched him. He spoke to us. Peter, please—” The word catches horribly in my throat. Humiliating. “Please stop doing this.”

The room goes painfully still after that. Even Sean stops moving. Peter looks at me through the glass and for one awful second I think he might break. I see it flicker across his face—hesitation, grief, something dangerously close to guilt. His mouth parts slightly like he’s about to say my name differently this time. Hope opens inside my chest so suddenly it hurts.

Then the interrogation room door slams open. The sound cracks through the room like a gunshot.

My pulse stutters violently. Everything inside me changes at once.

I feel him before I see him.

Heat slides low through my body first, sharp enough to feel invasive, followed immediately by terror so cold it locks my lungs halfway closed. My skin tightens. Every nerve in me wakes up screaming.

No.

No, no, no—

My head turns anyway.

And there he is.

Deogal steps into the interrogation room with the calm, effortless certainty of a man entering somewhere he already owns. The fluorescent lights catch briefly along the sharp lines of his black suit as the door seals shut behind him with a heavy hydraulic hiss.

My lungs stop working. Relief detonates through me so brutally it nearly makes me sob.

He’s here.

Oh God, he’s here.

My body loosens around the sight of him before horror catches up. Every muscle unclenches at once like something inside me has finally stopped bracing for impact. Tears blur my vision harder.

Because if he’s standing there—then I’m not insane.

But the thought barely survives before something worse arrives.

He looks wrong.

There are no restraints. No bruises darkening his throat or wrists. No orange. He’s not trapped. He’s not damaged. The version of him standing in front of me now looks untouched by everything that destroyed me.

A tailored black fabric pulls cleanly across broad shoulders. A crisp collar. Dark hair pushed neatly back from his face. He looks expensive. Controlled. Even Peter straightens when he walks in.

And then his eyes find mine.

Everything inside me goes silent.

Because there’s nothing there. There’s no heat or fascination. None of that terrible intimate attention that always felt like being slowly undressed from the inside out. No trace of the man who watched me through the glass like he already knew exactly how I would break for him.

He looks at me the way Peter used to look at files, like I am something damaged sitting under observation.

The loss of it cuts so deep I physically flinch.

And the truly horrifying part—the part that makes shame crawl hot beneath my skin—is that even now, chained to this chair, drowning inside whatever nightmare this is, some pathetic starving part of me still reaches for him anyway.

Because at least he came back for me.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Rheda