7. Chapter 7
Colt
Sleep came the way it always did now—like a weight dropped on my chest.
I'd pushed my body past the point of argument. Three hours in the gym. Every muscle screaming. Every piece of myself that still had the capacity to hurt was screaming. I'd come home, collapsed on the bed fully clothed, and let exhaustion drag me under.
For approximately two hours, there was nothing. Black. Void. The kind of sleep that wasn't restful but was at least empty.
Then the dreams started.
The interrogation room was cold. No windows.
The walls were concrete painted a shade of gray that existed nowhere else in nature.
There was a chair bolted to the floor. Restraints attached to the arms. I could feel them around my wrists—not tight enough to cut off circulation anymore, but tight enough to remind me that I couldn't move.
A man stood in front of me. His face kept shifting. Sometimes it was one of the interrogators. Sometimes it was no one I recognized. Sometimes it was Ditch, but that didn't make sense. Ditch wouldn't be here. Ditch would never—
"Where is he?" the man asked. His voice echoed in the small room. "Tell us and this ends."
I knew who he was asking about. Knew that whatever I said would be the wrong answer because the questions were never designed to gather information. They were designed to break faith. To make me question everything I believed about the people I loved.
"I don't know," I said, but my mouth was full of water.
No. Not water. I was being waterboarded. The sensation of drowning while conscious. The absolute certainty that this was how it ended—lungs filling with liquid, body convulsing, brain screaming that there was no air left in the world.
Then they stopped. Let me cough. Let me gasp and remember what breathing felt like.
"Again," someone said.
And they did it again.
The torture cycled. Hours. Days. I couldn't tell.
The lights never turned off. The sounds never stopped.
At some point, I realized I didn't know my own name anymore.
Couldn't remember why I'd been brought here.
Could only remember the interrogation and the water and the feeling of my body betraying me by continuing to survive.
When did that become undesirable?
The dream fractured. The interrogation room dissolved into something else—a cell. Smaller. Darker. I was alone now, and somehow that was worse. Alone meant there was no one to interrogate, which meant I was just here to suffer. Punishment for something I couldn't remember doing.
My hands were bleeding. From the restraints or from something else, I couldn't tell. The pain was distant. Everything was distant. Like I was experiencing my own torture from somewhere above my body, watching it happen to someone else.
When I woke, I was still convinced I was there.
The dream didn't end. The waking didn't help. My body knew, with absolute certainty, that I was still in the black-site. Still trapped. Still drowning.
I came upright in bed gasping for air like I'd actually been waterboarded. The room was wrong. Too dark but not the right kind of dark. The ceiling was too close. The walls weren't concrete but they felt like they were.
Where was I? How long had I been here? Had they moved me?
Panic flooded through me like ice water. Real panic. Primal panic that didn't care about logic or reality or the fact that I was supposedly safe at home.
I lunged out of bed, and I started searching for threats. Checked the windows—they were barred, or they felt like they were. Checked the closet. Checked under the bed like I was ten years old and afraid of monsters.
There were no monsters. Just my apartment. Just the space I'd rented to escape the club house and the constant awareness of others. Just walls and furniture and emptiness.
But my nervous system wasn't listening to logic. My nervous system was convinced I was being held in an interrogation facility, and it was screaming warnings that I needed to escape.
I knocked over a lamp. It shattered against the hardwood floor. The sound was too loud. Everything was too loud. My own breathing sounded like drowning. The ambient noise of the city outside my window sounded like footsteps approaching.
They were coming. The interrogators. Coming to continue the questioning. Coming to find out if I'd talked. Coming to finish what they'd started.
I backed against the wall, and I tried to breathe and I realized I had no idea what reality was anymore. Had no way to distinguish between the dream and the waking world.
That was when I reached for my phone.
I didn’t remember making the decision to call. Don't remember pulling up contacts and finding her number. It was muscle memory or instinct or some part of my brain that still had enough executive function to recognize that I was spiraling.
Caroline's phone rang at 3:47 in the morning.
She answered on the second ring, and her voice was alert enough that I wondered if she'd been asleep or if she'd somehow been waiting for this.
"Colt?" she said, and my name in her voice sounded like grounding.
"I'm—" My voice didn't work. My throat was raw from screaming or from the waterboarding or from something else. "I'm still there. I'm still in the interrogation room. They haven't—they haven't let me go."
"You're not in the interrogation room," Caroline said, and her voice was calm. Steady. Like she'd been trained for exactly this moment. "You're in your apartment. You're safe. I'm going to stay on the phone with you, okay?"
"You don't understand. The walls—they're closing in. The room is too small. I can't—"
"Focus on me," she said. "I need you to tell me five things you can see."
"What?"
"Five things you can see right now. In your apartment. Not in the interrogation room. In the real place where you are."
I looked around my apartment like I was seeing it for the first time. My body was still panicked, but my brain was starting to engage with her question.
"Wall," I said. "Dresser. Window. Lamp. Books."
"Good. Now tell me four things you can feel."
"The floor under my feet. Air on my skin. The wall behind me. My shirt."
"Three things you can hear."
I listened. Forced my nervous system to process actual sound instead of phantom threat.
"Traffic outside. My breathing. Your voice."
"Two things you can smell."
There was a long pause. I focused. "Sweat. The city outside."
"One thing you can taste."
"Blood," I said, and I realized I'd been biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw it.
"That's okay," Caroline said, like the blood wasn't concerning. Like my entire nervous system misfiring was just another weekday for her. "You're grounded now. You're present. Tell me where you are."
"My apartment," I said, and my voice was shaking. "Texas."
"How long ago did you escape the black-site?"
"Six weeks. Seven weeks. I don't know."
"You did escape," she said. "You survived. You're not there anymore. Your body is just remembering what it felt like, but you're not actually experiencing it right now. What you're experiencing is a memory. A nightmare. It feels real, but it's not happening in the present."
I leaned against the wall and I just breathed. In. Out. In. Out. My heart was still racing but it was slowing. My nervous system was starting to believe that maybe I wasn't actually in immediate danger.
"Thank you for calling me," Caroline said. "That was brave. That was exactly the right thing to do."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her that calling a woman at four in the morning because you're losing your mind isn't brave. It's pathetic. It's weakness. It's admitting that you can't handle your own crisis.
But I was too tired to argue. Too raw. Too grateful that she'd answered.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't be. This is what I'm here for. Are you safe right now? Do you need me to call someone?"
"No. I'm—I think I'm okay now. Just freaked out."
"That's a reasonable response to a nightmare about torture," Caroline said. "Your nervous system was reacting to a perceived threat. The fact that the threat wasn't real doesn't make the response invalid."
We stayed on the phone for another twenty minutes. She didn't push me to talk about the nightmare. Just let me sit with the after-effects of it while she stayed present on the other end of the line.
Eventually, my heart rate normalized. The panic receded to something manageable. The apartment started to feel like my apartment again instead of an interrogation cell.
"You should try to sleep," Caroline said. "If you can. But if you can't, that's okay too. Call me back if you need to. Even if it's not scheduled therapy time. You have my cell number."
"I'm embarrassed," I admitted.
"Don't be. You experienced severe trauma. Nightmares are a completely normal response. The fact that you're processing it instead of white knuckling through it alone is actually progress."
After I hung up, I sat on my destroyed apartment floor, and I felt something shift inside my chest.
For weeks, I'd been trying to handle this alone. Trying to prove that I could survive my own breakdown without needing anyone. Trying to maintain some image of strength and capability while I was actively falling apart.
And then I'd called a woman I barely knew, and she'd talked me back into reality like it was the simplest thing in the world.
She hadn't judged me. Hadn't treated my panic like weakness. Had just shown up on the phone and helped me find my way back to myself.
I sat in the dark, and I understood that I'd just done something I hadn't thought I was capable of anymore. I'd asked for help. I'd been vulnerable in front of another person. I'd allowed her to witness the absolute worst of me.
And she'd treated me like I was worth saving.
That realization was almost as overwhelming as the nightmare had been.