CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I can tell something is wrong the moment he looks at me.
The mask is still in place, but something behind it shifts—subtle at first, then unmistakable. His body goes rigid in a way that isn’t anger or restraint, but recognition so sharp it steals the space between us.
And when his gaze settls on me, it doesn’t feel like it lands at all.
It goes past me.
Not seeing me the way he usually does— controlled, possessive—but like I’ve been overlaid with something else entirely. Something that makes his stillness fracture just slightly at the edges.
“Take her to the white room,” he says—flat, emotionless. Like he’s ordering coffee.
The guard doesn’t speak. Just grabs my arm and starts walking.
I don’t resist. Not because I’m not afraid, but because fear has already frozen me solid.
The hallway stretches longer than I remembered. Every fluorescent light above buzzes like a warning. Each step echoes like a countdown.
The white room isn’t a place you go to talk things out. It is a place you go to disappear for a while—or worse.
The door opens with a hiss. Inside: nothing. Just blinding white walls, a bench, and static crackling from hidden speakers. No furniture. No windows. No clock. The kind of place that makes time unravel.
“What did I do?” I ask, turning to the guard.
He doesn’t answer. Just shuts the door.
And then it is just me and the static.
The seal locks with a click that feels too final.
I turn back to the room—my new prison.
And just like that, I am alone again.
No—worse than alone.
Alone with myself.
I sit on the floor. Then stand. Then sit again. I count seconds, then minutes, then hours—but all of them feel like lies.
There is no way to track time here. The white doesn’t change. The noise doesn’t shift. The room is a coffin dressed in light.
I try to remember the last time I’d done something wrong.
What had I done?
I sat straight. Posture perfect. I hadn’t spoken unless spoken to. I’d said Sir—I was sure I had. Hadn’t I?
Had I looked too long at someone?
Had I breathed wrong?
Had I called him the wrong name when he was pleasuring me?
Was that it?
I hug my knees to my chest and try not to move. Try not to cry. Try not to breathe too loud. The static from the walls crawls over my skin, seeping into my head, my blood, my bones. It is like drowning in light and noise, and the worst part is —no one is coming.
That’s what I tell myself.
That’s what they want me to believe.
But one name still lives in the back of my throat like a prayer I don’t dare say out loud.
Shoomaker.
It slips in like a splinter under my skin—sharp and impossible to ignore.
His voice echoes in my skull. You don’t have to talk yet.
Not soft in the way comfort is soft—but controlled in the way everything about him is controlled, like even gentleness is something he decides to allow.
The kind of voice that doesn’t rush me, doesn’t demand immediate obedience, but still makes it clear I’m being watched. Observed. Accounted for.
A pause given on purpose.
A silence I’m expected to fill correctly when I’m ready.
A chance that doesn’t feel like freedom so much as permission.
And then—I let the walls slip away.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough to imagine it is him opening the door instead of a guard.
Him stepping inside, eyes full of that same deep, unbearable pain I saw years ago.
He’d pull me into his arms—no commands, no corrections, no punishments.
Just heat. Just him. His hands would cup my face, his touch burning away the cold that has soaked into my bones since the moment I stepped into this place.
“Daya,” he’d whisper like it meant something sacred—because he respected the name I gave him. In his eyes, Starling had died in that hellhole under the watchful eye of Hirsh and his men, and I’d never corrected him.
I could almost feel his thumb brushing beneath my eye, wiping away the tear I didn’t even know had fallen. His forehead pressed against mine, grounding me, tethering me back to a reality where men like him still existed. Where I hadn’t been forgotten. Where rescue isn’t just a cruel daydream.
“I'm here now,” he’d say. “No one will ever hurt you again.”
His hands would slide down my arms—slow, doting. Not to restrain. To feel. To know I was real, that I had survived. And maybe…maybe he’d kiss me. Not with hunger. Not like the others. But with purpose. Like he needed to prove to me, to himself, that I wasn’t broken beyond repair.
I want that so badly my body aches with it. I want his lips to crash against mine until the fear shatters. Until the static stops. Until the White Room disappears and I was his again. Or maybe for the first time.
I whisper his name into the fluorescent blur, my lips barely moving.
“Shoomaker…”
And for one heartbeat—
Just one—
I believe he can hear me.
“Please,” I whisper next, smaller now, stripped down to something raw. “Please… save me.”
It isn’t loud. It isn’t dramatic. It’s worse than that. It’s honest. The kind of plea that doesn’t know where it’s going, only that it has to go somewhere.
I rock gently. Slow. Back and forth. Not enough to make noise. Just enough to keep from shattering completely.
The static hisses louder for a second. Or maybe it just feels that way.
I am unraveling. Slowly. Quietly. Perfectly.
And that is the point.
*****
Yesterday morning, The Warden let me out of the white room.
I had no way to measure time here. No window breaking the walls, no clock ticking in the background, no footsteps in the hallway to hint that anything outside this room was continuing without me. Only blank space and colder silence, stretching so long it stopped feeling temporary.
When the door finally opened, I was still curled in the corner, limbs stiff from staying too still for too long, thoughts dulled down to something almost weightless.
He crouched in front of me like he had all the time in the world, like nothing about the length of my absence mattered except that it had ended exactly when he decided it would. A faint smile touched his mouth as he looked at me.
“You lasted two days here,” he says softly. “Good girl.”
Two days.
That’s how long I was in there. It felt like forever.
I counted moments by the flickers in my own mind—by each thought that circled back to shame or fear or longing.
I’ve now been here for three weeks and four days.
And in all that time, I thought I’d seen the worst of what this place has to offer.
But the white room was a new kind of punishment.
Not pain, not violence—just absence. The kind that seeps into your bones and makes you question if you exist at all.
I thought maybe the White Room was meant to break me.
Maybe it was part of some calculated system I hadn’t fully decoded yet—a behavioral punishment, a psychological reset, a tightening of control just when I thought I could breathe again. Or maybe it was nothing so organized.
But what he doesn’t know—what none of them know—is that I’ve already lived through worse.
He doesn’t know about the trauma facility they sent me to after the compound raid.
The one with the cheerful nurses and soundproof walls.
He doesn’t know that I spent days—weeks—strapped into a straightjacket in a room where the walls breathed with padded silence.
Where I screamed until my throat bled, until the only sound I could hear was my own heartbeat roaring like a war drum inside my skull.
He doesn’t know the bruises those straps left.
Or the way the staff talked over me like I was furniture.
Like my pain was just noise. Like silence meant I was finally "progressing. "
He doesn’t know that the White Room reminds me of that place.
The stillness. The light. The slow-rotting static that claws at your thoughts. It’s the same. Isolation weaponized into obedience. Loneliness shaped into something precise enough to cut.
He doesn’t know that I used to dream about that silence. That I’d wake up choking on it. That I once clawed my own arms bloody just to feel something in the absence of sound.
The men from the ring—they used to haunt me too. Their shadows used to slip into every corner of my sleep, the echo of their laughter dragging across my skin like a stain I can’t wash off, lingering where it doesn’t belong, even after the sound is gone.
I used to wake up feeling their breath on my neck. Remembering their hands. Remembering the way they dragged me by the hair into the back of vans that smelled like oil and blood. I used to flinch at everything—footsteps, door slams, the scent of leather.
But lately…those ghosts had started to fade.
I had started to believe I was healing.
Maybe I was stronger.
Maybe I wasn’t broken anymore.
But that room…the white, humming nothingness…it showed me the truth.
I am still broken.
Not because I’m weak.
But because no one ever helped me put myself back together.
Because healing doesn’t happen in isolation.
And because even survivors need someone to hold them upright when the static gets too loud.
This could go on forever.
There’s no Montgomery here.
No Captain Shoomaker crashing through a door like a storm with a badge.
No rescue waiting just outside the walls.
Just me.
And whatever version of hell he’s designed for me tonight.