Chapter Twenty-Four
Raine
My body wants weeks of sleep. My brain won’t sign off on it.
Every time I drift, my thoughts circle back to the same place, as if rest itself is something I can’t give into yet.
The pain isn’t keeping me awake. That has a rhythm I understand now. What won’t let go is the weight of what comes next. Not something being done to me, but something I have to do.
Photos. Memories. Proof.
Letting a camera record what they did to me isn’t the hard part.
I survived it.
Seeing it is.
Asher seeing it.
I’ll have to look. Really look. Remember every bruise, every mark, every place they put their hands to remind me who was in control.
Asking for anything still twists something tight and ugly in my gut. Asking for this nearly steals my breath.
I focus on what’s steady instead.
The low wash of instrumental music threading through the room. The heater cycling softly. The faint, distant sound of traffic beyond the walls. None of it demands my attention. It’s just…here. Enough to keep me from spiraling.
Asher hasn’t stirred. His head lolls to one side, dark stubble shadowing his jaw. He looks tired.
No. Not tired. Worn.
I could let him sleep. Make this wait.
Except it can’t. Even after only a day, there’s a faint ring of yellow around some of the bruises.
I swallow. My throat pulls tight, but my voice doesn’t waver. “Asher.”
He jerks awake, attention snapping into place, eyes sweeping the door, the window, then locking on me.
He’s fully present in seconds. “What is it? Body or mind?”
Both.
“I’m okay,” I say. “I mean…no new…crisis.” My chest tightens. I push through it anyway. “I need your help.”
His posture shifts. Shoulders easy. Spine straight. Alert, but not alarmed. “All right. With what?”
The sentence I practiced tangles on my tongue. I take it apart slowly.
“I need to document it,” I say. “All of it. What they…did. To me.”
His gaze hardens into something almost feral. “You want a record they can’t bury.”
I nod.
The words he doesn’t say sit between us.
In case they find a way to bury me.
Asher
She’s upright. Propped against the headboard, blanket tucked around her hips. Her hair is mussed, uneven waves falling over one of the electrode burns at her temples.
The bruises stand out even more now that a hint of color has returned to her face.
Her eyes are clear. She’s not averting her gaze. That’s new. Progress. The woman I pulled out of Coherent Path’s cell wasn’t Raine.
This is Raine.
“How do you want to do this?” I ask.
She looks at my hands. Then back up at my face.
Advanced pattern recognition and predictive threat modeling under duress.
She’s thinking through the steps. Calculating the risk.
“I need you to be my hands. Take the photos. And notes. What I remember. But”—she swallows, pain tightening lines around her eyes—“I have to be the one in charge.”
I don’t smile. But something in my chest settles into place.
“You’re ops, I’m logistics. Got it. Rules?”
She takes a careful breath. “Same as…before. I have to see your hands as much as possible. No touching me without warning. Or for longer than you need to. If I say stop, you stop.”
“Okay,” I confirm. “To all of it. Along with any other rules you decide on once we start.”
She studies me for a long second. “One more thing.” Her voice drops, and she pins her gaze to my hands clasped in my lap. “The photos…no one sees them but me. Us.”
Us. The word catches me off guard. There’s so much trust packed into those two letters.
“I have a new burner phone that’s never been activated. It’s yours. I’ll take the photos with it, but you set the password, the encryption key. All of it. And when you want the logs I stole, you’ll have them.”
What little color she had in her face drains in a heartbeat. “Did you…the logs…did you read them?”
Fuck.
“I won’t lie to you, Raine. I spent a couple of hours with them this morning. But they’re mostly timestamps and codes. I can see when they escalated. But not how.”
“When…” she says, almost to herself. “When doesn’t mean…anything to me. There was no time there.”
Her gaze drops to my shoulder, but I don’t think she’s seeing me. Or…anything. Her jaw tightens. Her fingers curl weakly against the blanket. The tremors start slowly. Better than before, but still too much.
I rest my forearms on my thighs, keeping my hands loose.
“They logged everything,” I say quietly. “Every change. Every escalation. Start times. End times. Results. If you want to know how long, I’ll tell you. No commentary. Just a number.”
Her head lifts a fraction. Just enough to show she heard me.
“I’m not going to spring it on you,” I add. “You ask, I answer. If you don’t ask, it stays with me.”
Because she has to decide if she needs that tether.
Raine
When.
Number.
They took time first. Sequence. Day and night. Light and dark.
There was nothing but the hood. The restraints. The chair. The floor. Shattered minutes of sleep that wasn’t sleep, punctuated by food that wasn’t food, touch that was nothing but pain.
When stopped meaning anything. There was only again.
My fingers curl tighter in the blanket. The tremor spreads up my forearms. I try to catalog what I remember, and hit the same blank wall.
I don’t want to know.
I have to know.
My throat tightens. I force the words out anyway.
“How long?” I ask. The question feels like glass on my tongue. “Give me the number.”
He lowers his gaze for a single beat, jaw locking hard enough that the muscle jumps, then looks back at me.
“Eight days. Almost exactly. You arrived at 1800 hours last Wednesday. I got you into the car at 1652 yesterday. Today—”
“Is Thursday?” I whisper.
“Yes.” After a beat, he blows out a breath. “Raine? For the record you’re building, what matters most is you. Not the number. You.”
I focus on the blanket. The weight of it over my legs. The socks. My toes curled safely in cotton instead of freezing against cold concrete.
“Okay.” The word wavers, but I fight my way through it. “We start with pictures. Then notes. I’ll say what I remember. You can…help me fill in the holes later.”
“Okay. But…not right this second.”
I frown. “Why not?”
“Because you’re shaking,” he says. “And we’ll get further if we don’t start on an adrenaline spike.”
I look down. He’s right. My hands are trembling harder than I realized.
“Fifteen minutes,” he suggests. “I can make you something warm to drink. Tea. Or more electrolytes. I’ve got crackers. A banana. Or we can just sit here and breathe and pretend we’re not about to catalog war crimes.”
A startled sound slips out of me. Not quite a laugh, but closer than any other reaction I’ve had in days.
“Tea,” I say. “And…crackers, I think.”
He stands slowly, telegraphing every movement. Hands open. Palms empty. “They’re plain, but they’re not half bad.”
I watch him cross to the door then head down the hall until he’s out of sight.
Eight days.
The number sits in the center of my chest. Too heavy. It hurts. But it gives all the blurred memories edges I can almost line up.
Water runs in the kitchenette. A cabinet opens. The soft clink of a mug. The music changes again, something slower and soothing.
Asher moves with care, not silence, leaving a trail of sound I can follow.
When he comes back, he sets a small tray on the nightstand.
Steam curls from a plain, white mug, and a matching plate holds four crackers and half a banana, sliced into bite-sized pieces.
“Is it okay if I sit on the edge of the bed?” he asks. “I’ll help you with the tea.”
When I nod, he lowers himself onto the mattress, picks up the mug, and holds it where I can reach it with the heel of my hand.
“Same as before,” he says. “You guide.”
The first sip is too hot in the best way. The warmth spreads down my throat and settles in my chest.
I manage to pick up two crackers and three pieces of banana on my own. It’s a tiny victory—something I never would have thought to catalog before—but an important one.
I finish more than I expect before my stomach tightens in warning.
“That’s good,” I say. “For now.”
Asher takes the mug back immediately, sets it on the tray, and returns to the chair. Blanket over his legs. Hands visible.
The space between us stills, broken only by the music from the living room. The music he hasn’t turned off since I admitted I couldn’t stand the silence.
I could close my eyes. Stay quiet. Quiet is safe.
No.
That’s what they wanted. And they don’t get to choose for me anymore.
My thumb drifts toward my index finger. A small, automatic movement, searching for the familiar texture of the band that used to live there.
There’s nothing.
I press my hand into the blanket instead, grounding on the weight and the texture until the spiral loosens its grip.
I can do this. Have a conversation with the man who’s risked everything to stay between me and the door.
“You’ve seen me at my worst,” I say. “And I don’t know anything about you.”
His brows lift. “That’s not true. You know I break into terrible places and steal their worst secrets with no actual plan.”
“That’s…data.” Something unexpected pulls at my lips. Not quite a smile, but almost. “Not you.”
He considers that for a second, then nods. “Fair.”
He shifts in the chair, hands still where I can see them. “I’ll tell you three things about me no one else knows. Me. Not my work.”
“Okay.”
“One,” he says. “I cook when I can’t sleep. Hence the eggs this morning and the entirely unnecessary number of spices in the kitchen.”
A flicker of something like amusement stirs low in my chest. “That explains the marjoram. I’ve never seen a single recipe that uses marjoram.”
“It came with the spice rack,” he says, his eyes softening, crinkling at the edges. “Even I don’t have a use for marjoram.”
“And two?” My voice is getting stronger. Every word not followed by a correction is reassurance that maybe…I’ll find myself again.
“I own more burner phones than I do suits. And I own too many suits.”
“Occupational hazard?” I ask.
“Something like that.” Another grin, this one more relaxed. It highlights dimples I hadn’t noticed before.
“Three. I read manuals for fun. Not the glossy kind. The dense, badly translated ones no one touches unless something’s on fire.”
Of course he does.
Not thrillers. Not science fiction. Not biographies. Manuals.
Structures.
Systems.
The way things are supposed to work, even when people use them to break things instead of fix them.
It’s the first time I feel a clean overlap between us that isn’t pain or survival.
I file each fact away. Edges of a person, not a dossier.
With a shaky breath, I lift my gaze to his. “My turn?”
“Only if you want it to be.”
He’s giving me another choice. One I’m not quite sure what to do with.
My heartbeat ticks up, and the briefest tremor runs through my right hand. But after a moment, it fades.
“When I was a kid, puzzles were the only thing that quieted my brain. But they were expensive—especially the big ones—so I started turning them upside down because right side up stopped being interesting.”
“So, you don’t do things the easy way.” One corner of his mouth lifts. “Good. Easy is overrated.”
“Are you sure?” My voice drops to a whisper.
“Raine,” he says, leaning forward slightly, “if I wanted easy, I would have gone into emergency medicine.”
The weight to his tone settles something in me I didn’t know needed settling.
“Tea,” I say quietly. “Food. Talking? It helps.”
He nods once. “Good. Then we’ll keep doing it until you’re ready for more.”
I let my head rest against the pillow. My fingers find the edge of the blanket. My toes curl inside the socks.
They meant to strip me down to nothing. Instead, I’m safe with a man who won’t touch me without permission. Who offers me choices, not commands.
It’s not enough. But maybe…it’s a start.
Asher
She’s pale again, but she’s not disappearing. Her gaze is clear and tracking. Her mind—the one they tried to break—is already building sequences and patterns to fight back.
“Raine?”
Her eyes flick back to mine.
“Before we start, I need you to understand one thing. This—what we’re about to do—it’s your choice. Not theirs. You’re not reliving it. You survived it. All we’re doing is making sure it can’t be erased.”
“I know. Mostly,” she says. “Do we start now?”
I glance down at my watch. “We’ve still got five minutes. You’re actively encouraged to rest before you go to war.”
Her mouth twitches at that. Not a smile. But close.
“I’m not at war,” she says. “Not yet.”
“Then call it reconnaissance,” I say. “But either way, you’re not going into it alone.”