Chapter Five
Rheda
I don’t realise I’ve stopped breathing until something pulls me back into it.
A faint click sounds somewhere beyond the door, followed by the sharp buzz of the lock.
Peter straightens beside me. “He’s here.”
The words don’t land all at once. They sit in the room first, quiet and heavy, like everyone is waiting to see what comes with them. Then, they move.
Peter reaches for the jacket slung over the chair and hauls it over his shoulders, the thick material swallowing his frame. The guards move at the same time, pulling on theirs, helmets following—black visors sliding down, erasing every trace of a face beneath them.
Suddenly, there’s nothing human left in the room except me.
I stay where I am, uncovered. I feel exposed, too bare, compared to the uniforms around me. My pulse drums loudly. I wipe my slick palms against my trousers.
Peter doesn’t wait to see if everyone is ready.
“Just like we practiced,” he says, voice cold and steady. “File in.”
They move quickly.
Sean takes the outer door. Mike reaches for the second, a heavier barrier that seals the interrogation room from the corridor beyond.
Keys jingle softly, an almost mundane sound that feels out of place.
There’s the muted click of buttons being pressed, and a buzz that vibrates faintly through the floor.
The second door opens with a shriek of metal against concrete, the sound raw and protesting, as if the room itself resents being disturbed.
The guards fan out, taking their positions on either side of the one-way glass. Their weapons are raised, not aimed—held high and ready. The room suddenly feels over-occupied. There are too many bodies.
My next breath catches halfway down.
Peter enters last, and I notice he’s not wearing a helmet like the others.
He closes the door behind them and the sound is unmistakeable.
A hard, hollow thud that seals them off from the rest of the world.
I feel it in my chest, like a sudden loss of pressure, as though the air has been siphoned away.
He presses his palm against the door once, testing it, before turning his attention inward.
He moves to the centre of the room and takes his seat at the metal table, his back to me. I track it without meaning to. The shift of his shoulders, the way he settles, the exact placement of his hands on the table.
No one speaks.
For a suspended moment, nothing moves at all.
I keep my eyes on the door.
I brace for shouting. For restraints rattling violently. For spit and threats and officers barking over each other.
That’s usually how this part goes.
I wait, and the seconds tick loudly in my mind.
Then, Peter shifts. In one swift movement, he raises his hand to alert everyone. It snaps back by his side immediately.
The sound of a lock clicks. It ripples through the speakers opposite me. I hear every single pin detach, the tiny sounds echoing like bullets in my eardrums.
I lean forward in my chair. I don’t remember deciding to move. One second, I’m sitting back, the next I’m closer to the glass, like the distance suddenly matters.
The door groans as it opens.
It’s happening.
The first thing I notice is how the guards move around him. One keeps half a step behind him at all times, like he doesn’t trust the distance between them. Another shifts aside, giving him space without being asked.
My eyes finally settle on the man in the middle.
His height is the first thing I can’t make sense of.
His head nearly clips the top of the doorway when he enters, body stretched like something from a nightmare.
Prison fabric pulls tight across broad shoulders.
The orange is too bright. It draws my attention in a way I don’t like, and I note instinctively that it matches the colour of his file on my lap.
And for a ludicrous moment, it feels as though I’m meeting him through the colour.
Warmth follows through the fabric, throbbing like it has its own pulse.
He keeps his head lowered as he enters, dark curls falling across his face, and for one irrational second, I’m grateful for the obstruction. Because even without fully seeing him yet, something low in my stomach tightens hard enough to hurt.
He’s flanked by four heavily guarded security guards, who say nothing to him. There are too many bodies in the room. Too many men around him for it to feel sensible, and yet it still doesn’t feel enough. I don’t know why I think that. I don’t know why I care.
He moves without urgency, but something about the slowness feels deliberate rather than controlled. The chains scrape softly against the floor.
He takes his seat without prompting.
The guards move fast, securing the chains around his wrists and ankles to the clamps in the ground. Click. Click. Click. Everything flows in one motion until the chains hold him still.
They step back. And now, settled in the chair, under the harsh lighting of the overhead lamps, I finally see his face.
Not all at once, but in pieces that refuse to soften when they join together.
The sharpness of bone. The stillness of his mouth.
Eyes too dark to read at this distance, though distance suddenly feels like a weak defence.
I’m drawn to the deep reds of his lips. My eyes snag on them before I can stop myself.
His lower lip looks bitten raw, swollen slightly at one corner like he’s been chewing at it for hours—or using it for something worse.
It’s a stark contrast to the paleness of his skin, even more so to the deep purple bruises under his eyes, the colour of a man that doesn’t sleep well.
Something in me recoils like it remembers him before I do.
My eyes find his name on the file.
Deogal Attor.
The name feels wrong in my mouth immediately. Too sharp at the edges. Too heavy. And I have the ridiculous urge to glance toward the door like something might hear me saying it.
My attention slides back to him. He just sits there; attention fixed on the table. Blank. Disinterested. The four guards he came in with file out of the room, and the air becomes heavier.
“You’ve been busy,” Peter says. “Three bodies confirmed.”
There’s no soft opening, no introduction. He just lays the words down like evidence.
“More we haven’t found yet.” He lets that sit. “I dislike unfinished work.”
He waits but Deogal gives him nothing. His face is a perfect statue of stoicism. His body is a statue of stillness, eyes fixed firmly on the desk in front of him, not breaking away for even a blink. It is unlike anything I have been trained to read, and the gap bothers me more than it should.
“Hmm,” Peter hums. He shifts forward in his seat, trying to catch his gaze. “Not much of a talker, are we?”
He doesn’t appear to even breathe.
The seconds tick by. Peter studies him for a beat, then folds his hands.
“You’ve already had the polite version of this conversation, Mr Attor,” His voice lowers. “I wouldn’t mistake this unit for hospitality. What happens next depends entirely on how much inconvenience you feel like causing me.”
But it’s as if Peter never spoke. The criminal, Deogal, doesn’t react, not even for a breath.
“Alright,” Peter says. He opens the file with deliberate care, turning each page slowly enough for the sound to carry through the room. Paper against paper. Soft. Dry. Repetitive. My fingers flex once.
“Bodies only stay hidden when the people looking for them are lazy.” He says it in the way men talk about weather. He turns a page in the file. “We are not lazy. We will find the other bodies.”
The silence stretches long enough that I become aware of my own breathing, each inhale suddenly too loud in the room.
I try to break him down into parts. I start with his jaw, but there’s nothing. No grinding teeth or clenching behind his composure. His mouth just sits there, loose and still, like the rest of him has forgotten movement entirely.
My attention drops to his shoulders next. Most people hold tension there before they realise they’re doing it. The body always betrays itself eventually. Tightening. Locking. Preparing for impact before the face catches up.
His don’t. Not even a twitch beneath the orange fabric.
Hands.
They rest loosely in his lap, fingers relaxed, not curled, not gripping, not fighting the restraints in the way they should be. The chains hang from his wrists without resistance, heavy and dull against his skin.
I focus on his chest last.
Breath.
I stare too long trying to find it. Waiting for the rise beneath the jumpsuit, the subtle expansion of ribs, any small shift at all.
Nothing.
A cold ripple moves through me before I can stop it. Because for one stupid second, I genuinely can’t tell if he’s breathing.
“I’ve read the reports.” Peter says.
“They died slowly.” He lets that sit for a beat, eyes still on the file before lifting them again. “You made sure of that.”
The silence stretches.
“Torture.” Peter says at last. “So, tell me—was that the point? Did they deserve it?”
Deogal doesn’t even blink.
My stomach knots. I press my fingers lightly against my mouth to stop the shake. Peter exhales through his nose, the first real crack in his rhythm. Small, but there.
“Make no mistake, Mr Attor, silence is not resistance. The men who transferred you here made a great deal of noise about special handling,” he tilts his head, just slightly. “But I’ve never found men to be more inventive than when they’re afraid.”
He leans closer.
“And fear,” he adds, “is something we can manufacture.”
Nothing in him moves. Not a shift, not a tell—nothing gives.
I glance at my notepad like it might hold an answer. A slower, colder discomfort settles under my ribs. If Peter looks at my notes now, he’ll see the truth immediately—I have nothing.
Time stretches. The clock seems to taunt me.
“You know what I think?” he says after a moment. “I think this silence is ego.”
Nothing changes in Deogal’s posture.
“I think you enjoy sitting there believing you’re the smartest man in the room.” Peter taps once against the photograph. “Men like you usually do.”
Still nothing.
Peter waits then, deliberately.
He lets the silence swell between them until it starts pressing against my ribs too, thick and ugly and impossible to ignore. My breathing suddenly sounds too loud in my own ears.
“But here’s the problem,” Peter says eventually, voice quieter now. “Silence only works when the other person still believes you have control.”
Peter changes direction without warning. One second his voice is level, almost conversational, and the next a photograph cracks violently against the metal table.
The sound makes me jump hard enough that my pen slips against the page.
I can’t properly see the image from behind the glass. Just flashes of pale skin beneath harsh lighting. A body. Male, I think. Something dark around the ribs.
Peter slides the photograph closer to Deogal with two fingers.
“Doctor Elliot Vale.”
The room seems to tighten around the name.
“Fifty-Five years old. Trauma surgeon. Married.” Peter pauses briefly. “They found him opened up on his own operating table.”
My stomach turns sharply.
Peter’s gaze never leaves Deogal.
“Brutally,” he adds.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Deogal doesn’t even look down.
Peter leans back slightly in his chair, studying him.
“The surgical cuts were precise,” he continues. “Not frenzied.” His eyes stay fixed on Deogal. “You wanted him conscious for as much of it as possible.”
My fingers tighten around my pen.
“That tells me something important about you.”
I find myself staring too hard again, tracking his jaw, his throat, the rise of his chest, desperate for something human to break through the stillness.
Nothing comes.
Deogal just sits there beneath the lights, hands resting loosely in his lap, dark curls shadowing his face, looking less like a man being interrogated and more like something waiting for the room to exhaust itself first.
The silence drags on.
Peter turns another page in the file, but the movement feels tighter now. Less controlled. I catch the smallest fracture in his composure before he smooths it away again.
My eyes drop to my notebook.
Blank.
Not a single useful note in over forty minutes.
Heat crawls faintly up my neck. My pen hovers uselessly above the page before I lower it completely.
Without thinking, I reach for the badge clipped against my chest. My thumb presses hard against the plastic edge, grounding myself in the familiar shape of it, the proof that I still know what I’m doing.
But for the first time in my career, I’m looking directly at someone and getting almost nothing back.
No.
Worse than that.
I don’t think Peter is getting what he wants either.