Chapter 5
CHAPTER
FIVE
I come back to myself in stages.
First there’s pain.
Not sudden—not immediately. Just a deep, ugly ache spread across half my body like something large and methodical has gone through me and tested every rib for weakness.
My head throbs in time with my pulse, heavy and wrong, and there’s a copper taste at the back of my throat that tells me I’ve either bitten my tongue or bled enough into my mouth to make the difference irrelevant.
Then there’s the cold.
Stone underneath me. Damp in the air. The sort of chill that creeps into your bones and stays there.
I keep my eyes shut for another second and take stock the way I’ve taught myself to do in bad situations.
Fingers. Toes. Breathing. Nothing feels missing.
That’s a nice start. My right side hurts when I drag in a deeper breath, which probably means bruised ribs and maybe one cracked.
My shoulder is on fire. My head feels like someone tried to split it with a crowbar.
There’s dried blood stiff in my hair near the base of my skull.
So.
Not dead.
Not yet.
I open my eyes.
The cell is smaller and cleaner than I expected.
Not spotless—there’s mildew in the corners where damp has been allowed to settle into the mortar, and the bucket in the far corner smells exactly as bad as buckets in cells always smell—but it isn’t a dungeon from an old fantasy film either.
The walls are fitted stone, pale grey under the weak light spilling in through the barred hatch in the door.
There’s a narrow cot bolted to one wall with a thin mattress on it, the kind designed less for comfort than for reminding you that someone else decides whether you sleep at all.
No windows.
No visible way out.
The air tastes faintly metallic.
I push myself upright too quickly, and the room lurches.
Black spots crowd the edges of my vision for a moment, and I sit very still until they pass.
My wrists aren’t bound. That’s something.
My boots are gone, though. Jacket too. They’ve left me in my shirt, which is ripped at the shoulder and stiff with dried blood and canal muck.
I touch the back of my head carefully and hiss.
Yeah. That’ll do it.
For a while I just sit here with my feet on the floor, elbows braced on my knees, breathing through the pain and trying not to think too hard about how badly this could go.
The warehouse.
That’s the first thought that really hits.
The guards took me outside it. They never got through the door. Unless they went back after I blacked out. Unless they’re there right now, kicking through supplies and lifting trapdoors and asking the wrong questions of anyone too slow to run.
My stomach turns over hard enough that I swallow against it.
No.
Think.
If they’d found the tunnels, if they’d found any proof worth crowing about, I would not be waking up alone in a quiet cell, waiting politely to be questioned. They’d already be pulling people in. They’d be dragging names out through blood and fear. They’d want me awake to hear it.
So maybe they don’t know.
Maybe Garrick gave them me and only me. Maybe fear made him stupid rather than useful. Maybe the warehouse still looks like what it’s always looked like to anyone not paying attention: a run-down old building full of salvage, food, and one overly competent human who fixes pumps for bread.
I cling to that because there isn’t much else to cling to.
And then, because apparently my mind enjoys kicking me while I’m down, I think of Varek.
Will he know something’s wrong?
I know how bonds can work between fated mates. But I also know it’s different depending on the species and what bonds have formed.
Said bond pulls low in my chest, dull and uneasy.
He’s too far away… maybe. Or maybe I’m too far from where I’m supposed to be. It’s hard to tell with the thing. Half biology, half curse—all inconvenience.
I lean back against the wall and close my eyes briefly.
Don’t think about him being captured.
Don’t think about that huge body folded into a cell like this, silver eyes gone flat with pain while some crown loyalist tries to break him open for information about Dathanor, about the tunnels, about every Riftborn the rebellion has scraped out of the Queen’s reach over the years.
The thought makes bile rise in my throat so fast, I have to swallow twice.
No.
Absolutely not.
Whatever happens here, I do not give them the rebels. I do not give them Varek. I do not give them Dathanor, or Shanae, or the tunnel routes, or the names of the Glowranth who quietly keep the guards looking the wrong way. The city can burn me out of myself first.
The trick, I remind myself, is to decide that now. Before they bring tools into it. Before pain narrows the world down to one unbearable point and your body starts looking for any exit it can find.
I’ve had plenty of time to think about torture over the years. Hard not to, living in Terrafeara. The Queen’s people don’t even bother pretending they’re above it. Some days they treat suffering like administration. Efficient. Necessary. Beneath comment.
Back on Earth, I watched enough crime shows and bad action films to know the set dressing. Dark basements. Drains in the floor. Chairs with straps. Bright lights. The whole theatrical package.
Here? I’m less sure. Glowranth don’t need theatre. They have claws, strength, and a social order built around owning what they believe is useful. They don’t have to overperform cruelty to make it effective.
I rub my palms over my thighs and force myself to think clearly.
Questions will come first.
They’ll want names. Routes. Rebel contacts. Confirmation of rumours.
That’s the thing I keep circling back to.
Rumours.
If they had proof, I’d already be in chains. If they had proof, I wouldn’t be sitting in a locked room, waiting my turn. This smells like fishing. Dangerous fishing, sure, with the Crown holding the line, but still.
That means silence is safer than cleverness.
Or maybe not silence. Total silence can provoke its own kind of interest. But careful answers.
Small answers. Boring answers. The kind that make a man seem useful but limited.
A fixer. A trader in favours. A human who knows how to pass through districts because he pays the right guards and keeps the right machinery running, not because he’s moving people under the city.
I’ve done that version of myself before. I can do it again.
The hatch in the door slides open with a metal scrape, and I look up.
A pair of eyes studies me through the slot. Blue skin. Glowranth. Male, I think, though with the angle and the light, it’s hard to tell.
“You’re awake,” he says in his native tongue.
My throat is rough when I answer. “Observant.”
He doesn’t react.
“Prepare yourself. You will be questioned soon.”
The hatch slams shut.
That’s it. No threat. No timeline. No attempt to rattle me. Which is, somehow, worse.
I get up and pace the length of the cell twice, which is exactly four strides each way if I don’t want to clip the cot with my shin. My ribs object. My head objects. I ignore both.
Questioned soon.
Soon in places like this can mean ten minutes or six hours depending on whether the person armed with questions enjoys anticipation.
I crouch by the bucket, splash some water from the small jug beside it onto my face, and use the edge of the blanket to wipe away as much dried blood as I can.
My reflection in the water is no help. Brown skin gone ashy under bad light, one cheek swollen, shoulder-length locs half falling out of the tie I’d dragged them into this morning.
There’s a bruise blooming at my temple and another across my jaw.
I look like someone who got jumped in the street, which is unsurprisingly accurate. I retie my hair with shaking fingers and sit back on the cot.
Waiting is its own kind of violence. There’s too much space in it for memory.
Thomas slips in where I don’t want him because he often does when I’m trapped somewhere and can’t move enough to outrun him.
Not the good bits, such as they were. Not Coventry or Melbourne or the early days when I was twenty-four and stupid enough to mistake being chosen for being loved.
What comes back is always the same handful of moments: the way he could switch from charm to contempt in the space of a breath; the cold embarrassment of covering a bruise with long sleeves despite the 42°C heat; the disbelief the first time he shoved me hard enough to send me into the kitchen bench and then made me apologise for “provoking” him.
I used to think surviving him made me hard to frighten. Terrafeara cured me of that. But it also changed something else. It taught me there are worse things than fear.
Helplessness. Ownership. Being useful to the wrong people.
That, more than anything, is why I will not talk.
A human in this world is valuable in all the wrong ways.
Humans bind strongly, adapt strangely, get dragged into rift nonsense often enough to be treated as either resources or threats depending on who’s doing the looking.
The Queen would love to know what the rebellion has learned from us, through us, because all her power is built on controlling what arrives through the tears in the world and who gets to profit from it.
The thought of giving her even a crumb of that makes my skin crawl.
Hours pass. Or maybe only one. Without windows, time becomes a rumour. Eventually the hatch opens again, and this time the bolts draw back.
Two guards step in. Both Glowranth, both in Crown armour, both armed. One gestures with a growled “Come.”
I stand carefully. My legs are steady enough. Good. I’d rather not fall in front of them.
They don’t bind me. That says something too. Either they think I’m too broken to be trouble or they want me to understand that resistance would be pointless.
Probably both.