Chapter 4
Delilah Barrinheart
The air stinks of rot.
Not just from the blood in the concrete or the iron tang of rusted metal chains.
It’s something deeper. Older. The kind of decay that lingers when hope has died and stayed dead long enough to sour.
It crawls into your nose and settles at the back of your throat until every breath feels like swallowing something that used to be alive.
I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what time it is.
There’s no window in this cell—no sun to crawl across the floor, no moonlight to sneak in and whisper that I’ve made it through another night.
Only the fluorescent hum from a dying bulb overhead, flickering like it’s as tired as we are.
Sometimes it buzzes louder right before it dims, and I imagine it’s deciding whether or not to give up.
It’s just me and King. Both still here, still breathing, still bleeding—barely.
He hasn’t spoken since they threw him back in with me.
He sits against the opposite wall, one arm limp against his side, the other resting across his bent knee.
He hasn’t moved in hours. Maybe longer. Time lost all shape two or three tortures ago, melted together into one long stretch of pain and waiting.
I shift just enough to pull at the chains around my wrists.
The scrape of metal against bone is the only confirmation I have that I’m still in my body.
Everything else feels as though it’s floating above me—detached and cold, like I’m watching myself from somewhere near the ceiling.
There’s a gash along my ribs that I haven’t looked at yet, and a busted lip whose taste I can still sense every time I breathe through my mouth.
My jaw aches. My right eye keeps wanting to swell shut.
I’ve forgotten the origins of most of the bruises that mark my skin.
But I’m still here.
I glance at King. It takes me a moment to realize what’s different. What’s wrong…
The mask is gone.
I think it was ripped away during one of the interrogations, probably used to soak up the blood from the fresh split in his cheek when they threw the lamp at him for laughing after I spat on their boots.
That was the last time we were allowed to be together during an interrogation.
Now they only take him back when they want answers they won’t get.
Where’s Greenport? Who’s leading it? Who’s tracing us? What’s the layout? Are others coming?
Questions on repeat. Always the same. They circle the same drain, getting more desperate each time they realize we’re not going to give them what they want.
He sits slumped, barely breathing, one boot missing and the other barely laced. His clothes are torn and caked in blood, most of it likely not his. But it’s his face that takes my breath away.
I’ve never seen it before. Not once. Not in all those years of training sessions, debriefings, or offhand encounters on base, where he always lurked in the background like a shadow with orders.
He wore that black carbon-fiber mask like a second skin, like armor.
Like he’d welded it to his bones. Now, stripped of it, he looks like someone entirely different.
He’s younger than I expected—mid-thirties, perhaps.
Early thirties, if you consider the damage he’s endured.
His features are sharp and brutal—high cheekbones, a broken Roman nose that healed incorrectly, and a jaw so square it looks as if it was carved from stone.
A scar splits through his left eyebrow and curves downward, almost reaching his cheekbone, standing out against the blood-streaked grime.
His lips are chapped, split open at the center.
There’s another scar curving beneath his ear, half-hidden beneath a week’s worth of unshaven stubble, like someone tried to cut his throat once and failed.
But it’s his eyes that steal the breath from my lungs.
They are the color of old gunmetal—storm gray, unreadable, relentless.
The kind of eyes that have seen too much yet keep seeing anyway.
Yet, there’s a flicker there, something human buried beneath the wreckage, like a dim pilot light that refuses to go out.
I don’t know what I expected—perhaps a monster or a machine.
Some faceless executioner made entirely of bone and rage.
But this—this is a man. A wrecked, dangerous man.
A beautiful one, too, in a way that only ruins can be.
Not because he’s conventionally handsome, but because there’s no pretense left in him.
No mask to hide behind anymore. No distance. Just raw, unedited damage.
And for the first time since we were thrown in here together, I don’t feel like I’m locked in a cell with a ghost.
I feel like I’m staring at the last version of a man who’s been burned alive and kept walking anyway.
And now I can’t stop looking.
I struggle with silence, especially when I feel this alone. It’s like my brain thinks if I don’t fill the air, the dark will. I press my back harder against the wall, as if trying to anchor myself to the cold surface. With my voice trembling and broken, I whisper, “I hate this part.”
There’s no response. Not even a flinch. He’s either ignoring me or has withdrawn so deeply that nothing can reach him. King has always been good at disappearing without leaving the room.
I try again. “I keep waiting to wake up. Or for someone to kick down the door. Or—I don’t know. For someone to care.”
Still nothing.
I should stop. I know better. I’ve known King long enough to read between the silences. But there’s something about being trapped in hell with someone who knows you that makes the quiet unbearable.
King finally shifts. Not much. Just a flex of his jaw and a subtle inhale. But it’s enough. It means he’s listening.
“Jon.” My voice cracks on his name, scraping something raw on the way out. “Do you think he even—”
“Don’t,” King snaps, his voice low and gritty, like his throat’s been sandpapered by screams. He doesn’t look at me when he says it. He just breathes heavy through his nose and adds, “Now’s not the time.”
I go still. The words hit harder than any blow.
King finally lifts his gaze. His eyes are rimmed red, bloodshot, heavy with something that looks too much like guilt to be safe.
“You wanna survive this?” he mutters. “Then shut up. Save that pretty little chatter for after. If there’s an after.”
I flinch, but not from the words. From the way they land.
Hard. Blunt. Truthful.
The kind of truth no one else ever gave me—not even Jon.
King sighs. A long one. Drawn from somewhere beneath the cracked ribs and painkillers he never got. His head tips back against the wall, eyes closing for a beat like he’s gathering the strength to keep talking.
“You’ve always been talkative,” he murmurs, voice lower now. “Not with everyone, just with… him. And me. And your parents, back then.” His eyes flicker toward the floor like he hates remembering. “And that’s fine. That’s you. But here? That’ll get you killed.”
I swallow hard, my throat tight. “I’m trying to stay sane.”
He laughs, but it’s a bitter, breathless sound that turns into a cough halfway through. “Sane is overrated.”
Silence stretches between us again, but it feels thicker this time—shared, not just mine. Less like a void and more like a blanket we’re both suffocating under.
I glance down at my hands. The cuffs cut deeper every time I move, and dried blood flakes off like old paint.
I can’t help but think about how long it’s been since I touched someone without flinching.
Since I felt the warmth of another person’s palm without it being to restrain or reposition me.
Since Jon grabbed my arm at the range and barked something that wasn’t an order, yet still made me stand up straight.
God, I miss that version of us, even if it wasn’t real. Even if it was just tension and timing and my stupid, hopeful heart filling in the blanks.
King’s voice is raspier now, softer. “They want to break us. They want us weak enough to say something stupid.”
“And if there’s no one left to hear us when we’re done?” I ask, barely above a whisper. I’m not sure if I mean the enemy or Greenport. Or Jon.
His head tilts against the concrete. “Then we die quiet. Like soldiers.”
I’m not a soldier. I was trained like one, raised like one, and tested like one, but I’ve never truly been one. King wasn’t really a soldier either. He was a shadow—a ghost—someone who concealed the worst of the world behind a mask and a reputation that no one dared to challenge.
And now, here we are, both stripped of everything. Even the silence in this room feels heavier, less like protection and more like punishment.
I watch him for a long time, studying the patterns of blood blooming across his shirt.
Some of it is fresh, a darker stain spreading slow.
Some of it is older, dried, flaking with every breath.
Eventually, I let my head fall back against the wall.
I close my eyes and let the pain settle.
I let the silence wrap itself around me like a blanket made of steel wool.
Perhaps King is right. Maybe now isn’t the time to be myself.
Maybe it never was.
Maybe all those glances from across briefing tables, the clipped tension crackling like storm-static every time Jonathan Cash so much as breathed near me—maybe none of it meant anything.
Maybe I imagined it all. The heat. The weight.
The thing that was never quite said but lived between us like it had teeth.
Maybe I was just a girl in over her head. A girl with scars, both earned and inherited. A girl trained to read shadows but too foolish to see through a man like him. A girl stupid enough to think just being me was enough.
I shift on the concrete floor, pain blooming sharp along my ribs.
Everything aches. My mouth is dry, swollen.
I think my shoulder is dislocated. It crunches when I breathe, a grinding, nauseating sensation that refuses to fade into the background.
It’s all blurred together—the interrogations, the boots in my ribs, the questions asked in Russian and English and then Russian again, like repetition might wear us down.
Neither of us has said a word to them. I think that’s the only reason they keep us alive. For now.
I swallow the metallic tang in my mouth and glance at King.
“I’m going to die in here, aren’t I?” I whisper.
He doesn’t look up. “No. But if you keep talking, you might speed it up.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “You used to like when I talked.”
“Yeah, well,” he grits out, lifting his head enough to look at me, “this isn’t the time to rediscover yourself. Save it. Stay silent. It’s the only thing you’ve got left.”
That stings more than it should. But he’s not wrong.
I press my head back against the wall and close my eyes.
Silence has always been the safest part of me, even when it never felt natural.
When I was a little girl, I used to talk to fill the quiet, to chase away the weight in the room when my father came home after long stretches away.
But he’d hush me, always so gentle but so firm.
“Some things are not meant to be spoken about,” he’d say, brushing a kiss to my forehead.
“Not at school. Not with friends. Not even to your mother unless I say.”
I grew up in the kind of house where every word was measured.
Polished. Quiet. Our curtains were always pressed.
Silverware laid out precisely. I wore hair bows and ballet flats and always smiled when spoken to.
I had the kind of mother who taught me how to fold napkins for dinner parties and the kind of father who could kill a man with his hands and be back in time for family breakfast. The military wasn’t a legacy I stumbled into—it was a shadow that followed me into every room.
They told me to be good. To be small. To be still.
Eventually, I became the girl they wanted.
I stopped asking why my dad came home with blood under his fingernails or why there were always late-night calls in languages I didn’t understand.
I learned how to hold a weapon before I learned how to kiss a boy.
And when I finally got old enough to earn my place in their world, I stopped talking altogether.
Because silence was power.
But silence feels different here. In this place, silence doesn’t protect me; it just echoes. It bounces off the walls and comes back heavier, loaded with all the words I’m not allowed to say.
I open my eyes again, taking in a shaky breath. My vision is blurred, always hazy, like the air itself doesn’t want to let me see clearly. I stare at King, who is watching me through the slits of his bruised eyes, his expression unreadable.
“You were gone,” he says quietly.
“What?”
“In your head. Checked out. Just like that.” He snaps a broken finger against his thigh. The sound is dull, but the intention is sharp. “I hate when you do that.”
Irritation swells within me like a wildfire. “Well, forgive me if I’m not doing the silence thing the way you’d like. I wasn’t trained to get caught.”
“Neither was I,” he mutters.
The silence stretches again.
He shifts, groaning softly, adjusting his posture as if even sitting is a struggle against his body. “He’s coming, you know.”
I don’t answer.
Because I don’t believe it.
Because if he were coming, he wouldn’t have sent someone else. He wouldn’t have let me rot while his voice came through King’s earpiece like some ghost—calm, collected, cold. He wouldn’t have allowed me to think, even for a second, that I was expendable.
My jaw clenches. I dig my nails into my palms and force myself upright.
Every joint screams, but I refuse to stop.
I won’t. I begin counting the cracks in the ceiling, mapping the angles of the cell, and listening to the patterns of the guards’ boots outside.
Left. Right. Pause. Turn. Door. There’s a rhythm to everything, even this.
I’m not going to wait for Jonathan Cash to save me. Not this time. Not when I can save myself. Not when he made it so easy to believe I mattered—and then proved I didn’t.
I tuck my chin down, pull my knees to my chest, and start planning despite the protest in my shoulders from the tension I’m putting on my arms. Every breath hurts, but every breath is proof I still have something to fight with.
And this time, I don’t say a word.