Chapter Forty-Three
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MY BEDROOM FELT LIKE A CRYPT.
Dark and empty, silent as the grave I’d survived in for twenty years.
Silence never used to bother me, but tonight, it scratched at my skin and dragged my thoughts into places I refused to go.
Her.
What the fuck was she doing to me?
How did she make me suffer in completely new ways, even while curing me of old ones?
That damned room.
That damned moment.
That damned girl.
Dropping onto my bed, I rested my elbows on my knees and pressed my palms into my eyes until I saw stars. Whisper headbutted me before sprawling behind me on the blankets.
I’d known that room existed.
I’d heard it being installed after a particularly rough year when I was thirteen. Marcus had dragged a psychologist in to see me—diagnosing me with my first official mental breakdown after being trapped without seeing a single soul, apart from the nurses who came to harvest my blood.
For four years—ever since my parents tried to blow up Brimstone Industries in a joint suicide attempt—I’d been treated as the most precious key imaginable. Without me, there was no company. No endless wealth. No infinite power. No kingdom.
I’d been a terrified nine-year-old as I’d been stuffed in here after my parents never came home. The wall was built, the doors were locked, and the security cameras were installed.
For four awful years, my only form of communication had been with the men operating those cameras, warning me not to destroy them as I attacked each and every one until they were all gone.
By the time I’d reached my teens, my mental health took a nosedive.
I hadn’t been touched or hugged or cared for in almost fifteen hundred days.
I’d cried myself to sleep so often, I’d suffered severe health issues and constant sickness.
The day the psychologist came had been one of the best and worst of my short life.
Best because he spent a full week with me, diagnosing my issues through games, conversation, and just being with me.
And worst because he was on Marcus’s payroll.
He didn’t care that I got on my knees and begged him to take me out of here.
He wasn’t affected by my violent outbursts or sobs.
Instead, he told my prison guards how to ensure I didn’t have another breakdown.
The key to keeping me from going completely insane was company—which was where Whisper came in—and simulated freedom. Marcus had agreed because he needed me lucid enough to bleed and breed from, but I’d refused to participate.
The one and only time I’d ventured into the domed room, I’d been sixteen or so, and failed at yet another attempt at killing myself. I’d woken from being knocked out by the vitalsync core and couldn’t stop the screams for death in my head.
I just wanted peace.
I wanted to be free.
I’d broken enough that I’d accepted those psychologist’s tricks and entered the room in a full-blown panic attack.
My hands had trembled as I’d tried to start the program. My mind had blanked because I didn’t know how any of the technology worked and there was no one there to teach me.
I’d turned catatonic and curled up on the floor instead, feeling as if I’d been buried alive—forgotten and rotting, my head pounding until I’d passed out.
I’d forgotten all about it until Rook dragged me there. I’d forgotten quite a lot, thanks to trauma erasing certain things. Year by year, my realm of tolerance grew smaller and smaller until I never ventured into the upper levels or down certain corridors anymore.
I supposed that heartless psychologist would say I suffered from agoraphobia—fearing situations and spaces that made me feel trapped, unsafe, or powerless.
My quarters were the only place in the entire estate where I’d conditioned my mind to feel the smallest resemblance of safety. Everywhere else represented twenty years of daily torture, isolation, and helplessness.
It wasn’t just my mind that’d imposed such parameters, but my body too.
Each time I ventured into different parts of Cinderkeep, my system reacted with hypervigilance, waiting for pain.
My pulse would kick, my heart would race, and Marcus would think I was up to no good, giving me a higher dose of agony to make me behave.
A self-fulfilling cycle that I couldn’t break free from.
Yet her...
She was the first person to try to help me instead of hurt me.
The first person who spent any effort in understanding me.
The one and only person to ever care if I was happy.
And that...
Fuck.
I could survive living in hell.
I could exist in a never-ending nightmare of agony and blood, but I wouldn’t be able to survive her.
Raking my hands over my hair, I tried to stop thinking about her.
For the first time in decades, I felt different.
Alive and dead and changing.
I felt as if I’d actually stepped foot outside this prison and tasted the flavours of freedom. Every sense in my body believed I’d travelled to a jungle. That I’d watched creatures that I’d only ever read about in books and heard sounds I never knew existed.
And I was fucking desperate for more.
It woke up an emaciated part of my soul that’d long since decayed.
A primal part of me that was hungry and thirsty, savage and greedy.
It wanted to blow apart this estate.
To slaughter every man and woman responsible for my suffering.
But most of all?
Most of all I wanted her.
I wanted the way she looked at me, talked to me, touched me.
I wanted to know what it would feel like to give in.
But...what if she was like that room?
What if Rook had been planted in my cage to keep my mental health from shattering entirely? A mere program to keep me distracted with the illusion of connection? The hallucination of everything I’d been longing for and never had?
She was dangerous.
So, so fucking dangerous.
And I didn’t know how much longer I could last.
Out of countless women, numerous enemies, and two decades of agony, she might finally be the one to ruin me.
And if I didn’t find a way out of this hell soon...I might very well have to kill her to stop it.