13. Briar
brIAR
T he hiss of air releasing the mist always comes before the dark.
By now I logically know better than to waste strength clawing at the air to escape it, but instinct doesn’t care about logic. My chest locks, my fingernails scrape against the metal table until they split, and then the mist takes me anyway.
When I wake again, the world is white lights beaming down on me in the same sterile, cold room. Back where my last conscious moment was.
The lights sear down, so bright they feel baked into my skull. Cold presses up through the metal table beneath me, metal cuffs cinched so tight my wrists are nothing but throbbing pulses at the ends of my arms. I test them anyway, because fighting is the only thing that reminds me I’m still alive.
Terrance, as I’ve come to hear his name repeatedly after telling him never hearing it means it doesn’t matter, is already here. He’s always here.
The rhythm of his footsteps circles me, slow and deliberate, like a predator toying with prey that can’t run. “Tell me what you are, Briar,” he murmurs, voice low and obsessive.
I force a fanged smirk to the surface.
“I thought it would be obvious by now, but I’m a vampire, Terrance.” My voice is hoarse, edged with a laugh I don’t feel as extreme hunger pulls at my stomach.
I don’t remember ever eating and I haven’t seen any empty bags lately, with always being put under if I’m not in this damn room. It’s possible I’m still feeding while unconscious since that’s what I saw before, but the ache and constant fatigue makes me doubt it.
Unless I truly am under that much stress with repairing my body each and every fucking day because of this sadistic bastard.
He hums as if considering my retort. Then his knuckles connect with my newly healed ribcage that’s still brittle after healing yesterday's lung puncture. Air rushes from my lungs in a ragged wheeze.
“There’s still nothing like using one’s own hands,” he muses, flexing his knuckles like he’s cataloguing the feel of my bones under them.
I choke on the breath clawing its way back into me, “I mean, you still punch like a bitch, so I guess to each their own?”
His smile slants, sharper than the scalpel he plucks from the tray.
And the every day cycle begins again until I’m left barely clinging to consciousness, the pain threatening to pull me under atop the loss of blood.
The hiss comes. Then the dark.
When I wake, it once again feels like I never left the table at all.
“Your silence wastes us both time,” he says, as if we haven’t had this conversation a hundred times already. “Tell me your bloodline, girl, and I’ll make it easy.”
Easy . The word punches through me harder than his fists. Nothing here will ever be easy.
My throat feels raw when I rasp back, “You want easy? Hire a secretary to bone. I’m not giving you shit.”
The blow is quick, open-handed across my cheek this time, snapping my head sideways. The sting radiates across my skin, but it’s the dismissiveness of it that makes my fangs ache. The contempt.
My laugh scrapes out weaker than I want. “Running out of creative juices? What’s next, a paper cut?”
He doesn’t answer, but the scalpel does, parting through my cheek and into my mouth in one clean line. Heat blooms and blood slips fast down my face, trailing onto my body and the floor below.
My hiss of agonizing pain falters halfway through from what I see past Terrance and his self-satisfied smirk.
Callum.
He’s stationed by the wall as usual, arms crossed, posture rigid. Same as yesterday, same as the day before that. But when the scalpel bites deeper into me, his hands tighten against his biceps before he drops them to his sides and works them in and out of balled fists.
My heart slams harder than the pain itself warrants, because he looks…angry?
He looks straight ahead, still, and in an instant, he’s back to being the mirror of Elias’s perfect calm.
Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I want to imagine it. In this endless loop of white walls, piercing light, and my pain, even the shadow of someone giving a shit about me feels like a chance at freedom.
Darkness swallows me again after the hours slip by.
When I surface next, it isn’t under the white lights or with Terrance’s beady eyes on me.
It’s my cell reflecting back at me. The sterile walls press in close, the air heavy with the faint chemical tang of the sedative mist still bleeding through the vents.
For a moment, I lie there confused, cheek pressed against the cold floor, until I realize what dragged me up from sleep.
Hunger.
It gnaws hollow and endless, sharper than pain, deeper than a regular thirst. My gums ache, fangs nudging down as if they might tear their way free without permission. The blood bags piled near the fake wall are emptied, drained, and thrown carelessly aside.
Thin smears of red cling to plastic, dry and useless.
I crawl toward them anyway. My fingers scrape the floor as if the bags might miraculously fill again if I touch them. I press one to my lips, desperate enough to bite, but it’s empty, always empty, and the plastic crunches against my teeth until frustration snarls out of me.
The mist hisses faintly overhead, steady and constant, keeping my body too heavy to rise, too weak to even pound the wall for attention. It presses in with its false calm, an invisible leash that keeps me subdued even when I want to claw the world apart.
I slump back, bags scattered from my hands, and force myself to focus on breathing.
For a sliver of a moment, I imagine my father’s voice calling me for our family morning meeting to talk about what we have planned for the day, my mother’s hand brushing a stray lock of hair from my face as she passed behind my chair. My chest twists with the thought.
The memory fades, swallowed by the steady hum of the mist.
Sleep takes me again.
This time when I awaken to the bright lights, I don’t even bother testing the restraints. My wrists are already swollen from my body not healing as fast anymore. I keep my eyes on the ceiling and let him circle, let him ask his questions, let his hands and his blades do their work.
I don’t answer at all. Not even having the energy to retort.
His blows land anyway. My skin splits. My blood drips. The words “ What are you? What bloodline gave you this?” scrape the air again and again. I let them pass over me, trying to ignore the way the same repeated questions are starting to feel like torture themselves.
But I do notice Callum again.
His hands are rigid at his sides, fists clenched so tightly the bulging veins of his forearms stand out starkly against his skin. His chest heaves too fast, the rise and fall betraying rage, or grief, or both.
When the blade bites deeper, his body trembles. It’s barely perceptible, but I see it.
Something is breaking him, and Elias sees it too.
I catch the sideways flick of his warning gaze, quick and sharp to his brother.
The concern etched in Callum’s gaze is brief, but undeniable. His jaw tightens as finally his gaze drags to the scene of the monster bleeding on the table. It’s the first time I’ve seen him not focus on a wall behind me.
It shouldn’t matter. I should stop caring. They’ve already proven their loyalty doesn’t lie with me.
The hiss comes again, and I slip back into the dark.
When I wake, it’s my cell once more, but this time I’m not alone and there’s no hiss of mist through the vents. I lift a hand to wipe at the bleary fatigue pulling my eyelids down.
Callum crouches in front of me, arms loaded with blood bags, so many that a few slip free and skid to my body. His boots scuff against the tile as he shifts closer, lowering the stack into a pile by my side. Elias hovers by the open doorway, back rigid against the frame, his voice a sharp hiss.
“What the hell are you doing?” His arms are crossed.
“She needs more,” Callum snaps back, his voice rough. His hands shake as he thrusts a bag toward my mouth as I blink up at him.
“You don’t know that,” Elias shoots back. “We’ve been giving her plenty to offset the night shift not giving her any.”
“She’s starving!” The words explode out of Callum, bouncing off the white walls, and my eyes widen at the emotion behind them. “Or can’t you hear it? The way she breathes like every gulp of air is her last? She’s barely holding on after having to heal every single day for weeks now, Elias!”
Weeks .
His voice echoes, harsh and raw with emotion he probably shouldn’t hold for his captive.
In the silence that follows, I feel his hand brush my face.
A strand of ragged hair is tucked behind my ear with a touch so gentle it feels foreign in this place.
I haven’t felt that since the one time Dante cleaned my wounds, which feels like years ago at this rate.
Callum’s eyes crinkle at the edges as his lips tug down.
“I’m sorry.”
The whispered words roll through me, my mind instantly rejecting the hope that attempts to attach itself to them.
I can’t let myself feel that. Not now. Not after he’s let this happen to me for weeks.
He pushes the tube of the blood bag into my mouth gently and then instinct takes over despite the exhaustion weighing me down like it has the full backing of gravity itself behind it.
The copper tang hits me before my wounded pride can resist eating in front of him.
My fangs drop fully, hunger roaring through me like a fire igniting in each nerve ending.
I seize the first bag, tear into it, and drink.
The blood hits my tongue hot and rich and I can’t stop.
Bag after bag, tearing, draining, growling into the sterile air.
“This is madness,” Elias growls, pushing off the frame and striding toward us. “You’re hand-feeding her like some fucking pet.”
“Shut up!” Callum surges to his feet, his boot clipping one of the emptied bags, sending it spinning across the floor. “I’m not letting her starve to death because you’re too busy playing loyal little soldier.”
Tears slip free as I drink, shame scorching through me as I see them watching me.
My hands tremble as I clutch at the plastic, my sobs choking through gulps.
I can hear myself. The snarls as if I truly am an animal, and I hate them.
I hate the way I look. I hate that it makes the word “monster” look true.
The brothers’ voices blur into the frenzy as I feed.
Elias bristles, stepping into his brother’s space, the air between them crackling. “You think this makes you different? You think you’re not a soldier too that stands by and watches what our uncle does to her every day?”
“You don’t even look like it’s bothering you!” Callum snaps, shoving his brother back a step. His chest heaves, every line of him trembling. “All the time we’ve spent here has shown me who the real monsters are in this place!”
The words hang heavily in the air as the walls descend with Elias’s thumb pressing into a panel, blocking my view of them.
I curl tighter around the pile of bags, sobs shaking my chest even as I drink. My tears fall into the red I clutch, mixing until I can’t tell where the monster ends and the girl begins.
The bags dwindle one by one until all that’s left is plastic slick with teeth marks and my hands shaking around the last drops I can squeeze from them.
For the first time since I woke in this nightmare, the gnawing emptiness in my belly is gone.
The hunger that has chewed through me for days finally recedes, leaving me full, heavy, and hollow all at once.
My arms tremble as I shove the pile of empty bags away and push to sit against the wall.
My body aches everywhere but I can feel it working already, knitting, sealing, and setting.
Healing has always been violent in its own way, pulling as much from my mental energy as my physical.
Tonight it feels worse, like my bones are mending around despair.
Sleep tugs at me with brutal insistence as the mist seeps in. I try to fight it, jerking my head up as it falls down, over and over.
In the haze, my thoughts slip where they always go. To them. My family. My mother’s voice at my door. My Dad’s laughter at the dinner table. Papa’s hugs. Father’s bedtime stories when I was little.
The way they’d pull me in, every night, just to remind me I was theirs. Loved. Safe.
My chest tightens as the images flicker, too fragile to hold onto any longer.
What if they aren’t coming?
The thought lodges deeply into my heart.
What if this is all there is now? White walls. Torture. Blood bags and shame.
I shiver as sleep drags me down, my breath hitching against the tears slipping down my cheeks.
Maybe I’m not strong enough to survive this place.
The dark rises to claim me, and for once, I’m grateful to not feel anything at all.