Chapter 37
CLOE
I woke to white.
Not light.
White.
Bleached walls. Bleached air. Bleached silence. Even the ceiling was wrong—too smooth, too clean, like it had never belonged to anyone.
The floor beneath me wasn’t cold. It was indifferent.
A slab of concrete dressed in perfection, humming with fluorescent lights that didn’t flicker. There were no shadows here. No edges. Just brightness. Just exposure.
And I was alone.
The gag was tight. Fabric soaked in something chemical. My tongue tasted metal. My lips were cracked. No chains. No ropes. Just absence. They’d taken everything. The collar. My shirt. My sound. And given me back silence.
I moved slowly. Sat up. My muscles ached. My stomach burned. Not like pain. Like consumption.
The hunger was sharp already. Coiled. Alive. Not the dull gnaw of missed meals. This was deeper. This was cellular.
I tried to remember when I last ate.
Soup.
Wolfe’s kitchen. Kneeling on the floor. Devouring survival like it could anchor me.
I swallowed around the gag. Air rasped down my throat. The room had no corners. I crawled to the nearest wall. Pressed my hand to it. It didn’t give.
There was a mirror on the far side. But not mine. A window. One-way. I couldn’t see who watched. But I felt them.
The weight of it settled on my skin like breath that didn’t belong to me. I sat back. Pulled my knees to my chest. The hunger shifted. Deepened. Every organ inside me turned on the others.
My body was already devouring itself. But they didn’t come. They didn’t feed me. They didn’t speak.
I rocked once. Twice. The silence never broke.
I pressed my forehead to my knees. Inhaled the scent of my own sweat, my own fear, my own unfinished screams. And I waited.
That was the game. That was the point. To let me listen to the sound of my own body failing.
To teach me what power sounded like when it wore silence.
My throat clenched. I couldn’t swallow. The gag was too tight. But I didn’t cry. I didn’t whimper. I didn’t beg. I breathed. And in the white light of that windowless room, I became something new. Not clean. Not broken. Just waiting. Breath was all I had. And it was still mine.
The lights never turned off. They didn’t flicker. Didn’t hum. Didn’t shift from harsh to soft like they had any intention of pretending to care. They just burned overhead with that surgical, all-knowing glow. Flat. Cold. Constant. Like time didn’t pass here. Like it wasn’t supposed to.
There were no clocks. Just the weight of my own body reminding me that I hadn’t eaten. That I hadn’t stood. That I hadn’t been touched in hours. Maybe longer.
I’d stopped counting. Or maybe I never started. Because time only matters when someone might come. And no one came. Not yet.
The mirror on the far wall stared back at me.
But it wasn’t a mirror. Not really. It was a sheet of glass dressed in distance.
A barrier designed to remind me that I wasn’t alone—just invisible.
My reflection was there if I shifted the angle.
Just barely. Ghost-like. A smear of skin and bruises and collarbone and breath.
I sat with my back against the opposite wall. Legs folded. Spine bowed. Not because I was tired—though I was. But because the posture felt familiar. Felt safe. Felt mine.
The gag scraped the corners of my mouth. Dried spit flaked off every time I moved my jaw. My tongue was heavy. My stomach had stopped growling. It just curled in on itself now.
I stared at the mirror. I knew they were there. Someone was always watching. The feeling was too loud not to be real.
My skin itched from the awareness. Like eyes were peeling me back, layer by layer, documenting the erosion. Not looking for surrender. Looking for the moment before.
The moment just before I cracked.
The speaker crackled.
Just once.
Then silence.
It came again. Louder. Like someone tapping a microphone. Like they wanted me to flinch. I didn’t. Then the voice came. Low. Smooth. Familiar.
Ellis.
“Let’s see how long loyalty lasts without food.”
That was all he said. Nothing else. No gloating. No warning. No name.
The speaker clicked off. And I was alone again. Only I wasn’t. Because now it wasn’t just about watching. It was about listening. They wanted to hear me fall apart. They wanted to record the breath before I begged.
But I didn’t give them anything. Not the tremor in my spine. Not the pressure building behind my eyes. Not the twitch in my fingers that started every time my stomach twisted on itself like it was trying to devour whatever I had left.
I pressed my forehead to the floor. It was cold. Real. It grounded me. The tile didn’t care if I survived. It would hold my body either way. But I did. I cared. I kept breathing. That was the only sound I still owned. And I made it loud enough for them to hear.
I smelled the food before I saw him. Not grease. Not rot. Not the sour staleness of whatever they kept hidden in sealed bags for other girls, other cells.
Real food. Warm. Bread. Meat. Steam.
I hated that my mouth watered. My body betrayed me before he even walked in. I tasted it behind the gag, like shame.
The door opened with the same click as before, the same hiss of hydraulic weight releasing, but this time it was slower. Staged. Like someone wanted me to feel it in my chest before they even stepped through.
Ellis Ward didn’t walk in like a man with power. He walked in like a man who never had to reach for it.
He wore black. Tailored. His shoes caught no dust. His sleeves were rolled precisely one fold. The kind of perfection that made it look like none of this touched him. That I was just a smudge he planned to wipe off the glass.
He carried the tray with one hand. Balanced. Casual. The way Wolfe carried weapons. He didn’t look at me right away. He set the tray on the floor. Too far to reach. Close enough to smell. Then he crouched. Not beside me. Across the room. Folded his arms over his knees. Watched me.
I didn’t look at the tray again. I looked at him. Because I knew that’s what he wanted. Because I wasn’t here to crawl.
His mouth twitched like he wanted to smile.
“You’re holding up well,” he said. “All things considered.”
I didn’t respond. Couldn’t. But my breath stayed even.
His eyes dropped to the floor between us.
“Camille begged by day three.”
My body went still.
He saw it.
“She thought we were bluffing. Thought if she stayed quiet, if she stayed clever, we’d let her go.”
He leaned forward.
“We did.”
My heart stuttered.
He smiled now. Soft. Cruel.
“Thought maybe she’d forget what she saw. That if we gave her a window and a way out, she’d bury it herself.”
He shrugged.
“But it didn’t matter, did it, Cloe?”
My breath caught against the gag.
“No,” he said, standing slowly, smoothing his sleeves. “We won’t be making the same mistake with you.”
He walked to the tray. Picked up the bread. Held it like it offended him. Then tossed it back onto the tray.
The sound was louder than it should’ve been. He didn’t look at me again. He didn’t have to. Because I wasn’t supposed to fight. I was supposed to starve. I was supposed to fade. But I didn’t.
I closed my eyes. And I bit down on the gag. Hard. Pain kept me present. And I wasn’t Camille.
They wouldn’t let me go. But I wouldn’t leave anything behind to clean. It didn’t happen all at once. That was the cruelty of it. The slowness. The erosion.
My body didn’t scream anymore. It whispered. Little things. The twist in my gut. The way my eyes pulsed every time I blinked. The low throb in the back of my skull that made light feel like needles.
My mouth was too dry to swallow. The gag rubbed every time I breathed, and now even breath had turned to friction.
I lay on my side. The tray was still on the floor. The food cold now. Forgotten. A performance that ended when he walked out. A script he didn’t need to finish. He left it there so I could fail in front of it. I didn’t. But I was close.
My thighs shook. My ribs stung with every inhale. I felt the sweat between my shoulder blades go cold, then dry, then return again. I didn’t know how long I’d been like this. But I knew I was slipping.
The light overhead buzzed. My eyes fluttered. And then I wasn’t in the room anymore. Not fully. The white walls softened. Warped. The mirror melted into shadow. The floor no longer pressed cold into my cheek. Something else did. Fabric.
I blinked again. The shadows shifted. A woman sat across from me. She wasn’t real. But she was there.
Camille.
Not in the dress they buried her in. Not in the photo Barron kept on his desk. But in a plain blouse, sleeves rolled. Blood dried on the collar. Her lip split.
Her eyes didn’t blink.
You’re quieter than I was, she said.
My throat ached around the gag.
She tilted her head.
They hate that.
The lights flickered. I looked away. She was still there. Kneeling now.
You think you’re here because you matter, she whispered. You’re here because you remind them they’re not God.
The floor shuddered beneath me. I couldn’t move. My fingers curled into fists. Camille touched my shoulder. Or maybe I imagined it. It didn’t matter. The voice stayed.
Let them watch. Let them count your bones. Let them measure your breath. But don’t let them make you ask for it.
I stared at the ceiling. The light burned my retinas. Tears slipped down my temples. I wasn’t crying. My body just didn’t know what else to give. Camille’s voice faded.
My vision blurred. But my mind sharpened. And I whispered her name inside my head. Not because I needed her. Because I wanted them to remember who they buried. And what rose up in her place. It started low. A vibration. Not in the room. In me.
In the hollowed space between my ribs where breath used to sit. In the curve of my throat where Wolfe had once fastened a collar and taught me how stillness could become worship. In the marrow of bones that hadn’t broken but felt like they should have.
It didn’t come from memory.
It came from refusal.
My lips cracked when I moved them. The corners split. The skin there had turned dry from the gag, from dehydration, from silence weaponized into obedience. But I moved them anyway.
My breath stuttered through the gag. Raspy. Raw.
And I hummed.
Just one note.
Low.
Ugly.
Broken.
It scratched the walls of my throat. Vibrated through my teeth.
And I held it.
The sound didn’t travel far. The gag muted it. Muffled it. Made it small. But it was mine. It belonged to no one else. Not Ellis. Not the shark. Not the men behind the mirrored glass who watched me like I was a product waiting to be priced.
It was breath pulled from the part of me that hadn’t given up. The part that refused to be quiet even when quiet was safer. Even when quiet was expected.
I hummed again. Higher this time. A little longer. My lungs burned. My head spun. But the sound held.
The light overhead didn’t flicker. The tray of cold food still sat untouched in the corner. The mirror still stared back with nothing. But the hum filled the space between. Between me and them. Between what they thought they took and what I knew they couldn’t have.
Wolfe would hear it. Not with his ears. But with the leash. The one we never needed to speak about. The one tied to breath. To blood. To every broken piece of me he hadn’t tried to fix, only owned.
He would feel the pull. The vibration. The hum. And when he came, it wouldn't be to rescue me. It would be to end the silence. The hum wasn't a signal. It was war. And I was the anthem.
And Wolfe didn’t need to hear it. He just needed to feel me still breathing—so he could decide who to kill first.