Chapter Fourteen
Rheda
The viewing room feels wrong in a way I can’t place—too bright, too warm, like it’s trying too hard to be normal. I stand in the doorway a second longer than I should, rainwater dripping from my sleeves onto the floor. I wait for something to shift.
Peter’s already twisting and pushing buttons on the keyboard. Sean is leaning against the back counter. Mike has one boot hooked around the leg of a chair.
Everything is ordinary but shouldn’t be.
“Good morning,” Peter says, not looking up. “Nice to finally see you.”
“Sorry,” I say. It comes out slower than I expect. “I overslept.”
The lie sits wrong.
“We’re late starting because of you.” His tone is short, sharp. “Hurry up.”
For a second, I don’t understand. Then my face heats so fast it feels violent.
“Told you,” Mike says immediately, holding his hand out to Sean.
Sean swears under his breath and digs coins from his pocket. “I said she’d quit. Not oversleep.”
The words hit before I can brace for them.
Quit.
Oversleep.
Like they’d already discussed me, turned me into something small enough to bet on.
“Late is late,” Mike says, pocketing them. “And I said she’d come back.”
My mouth parts, but nothing useful comes out.
I can feel all of them now. Their attention drags over my red cheeks.
I lower myself into my chair because standing suddenly feels worse. My fingers tighten around the cup until the plastic bends.
Peter looks at me properly now. His eyes flick over my face, my soaked coat, my breathing. Annoyance sharpens, then settles into assessment. “You alright?”
“Fine,” I breathe. “My alarm didn’t go off.”
It sounds wrong the moment it leaves me—too thin, too easy—and I feel it sit there between us.
He doesn’t respond straight away. He just looks at me. “Don’t make being late a thing, Miss Ainsley.”
I swallow, and it catches again.
“Sorry, Peter.” I manage.
He dips his head, twisting back to the others.
“We’ve given him the opportunity to respond,” he says to the guards, switching so fast it makes my mouth dry. “We start introducing variables. See if anything changes.”
It settles badly in my stomach the second he says it. It’s cold. Clinical. Variables. It leaves too much room for my imagination to crawl into instead.
Pain.
Isolation.
Worse.
He leans back slightly and brings the radio up to his mouth. “We’re ready for him.”
The sound comes before the movement. It bleeds in under everything else, low and wrong, like the building is clearing its throat somewhere deep in its bones.
A distant buzzer followed by the slow, dragging protest of metal against concrete.
It doesn’t snap open, it grinds, like it resents being made to move.
Peter’s voice cuts across it, too calm.
“Don’t freak out today, Ainsley.”
I don’t look at him immediately. My fingers have already tightened around the edge of the table, nails pressing into the cheap laminate hard enough that it stings. I ease them back, slow, careful.
He’s watching me.
I turn, finally.
There’s something almost amused in his expression. The kind of look you give before something proves your point for you.
“I need you to observe,” he adds, softer now, like that makes it reasonable. “Without emotion.”
Without emotion.
Like it’s something you can just... switch off. Like it isn’t already sitting in my throat, thick and rising, making each breath feel painful.
Another door groans somewhere closer this time, louder. Near enough that it rattles something loose inside my chest.
I inhale but it doesn’t go all the way in.
The interrogation room door shifts. It drags inward with the same reluctant scrape, a sound that sets my teeth on edge.
The first guard steps through. Then another. Then two more. They spread without speaking, muscle memory in the way they take their positions—one to the side, one near the chair, one hovering just behind the threshold like he’s waiting for something to go wrong before it’s even begun.
And then—him.
Deogal doesn’t enter like the others. There’s no urgency, no visible pressure forcing him forward. He crosses the threshold slowly enough that it feels intentional, like he could stop if he chose.
His hands are restrained high against his chest; wrists fixed at an angle that looks wrong the second I really see it.
It’s not just restrictive, it’s unnatural.
It forces his shoulders back, pulls his spine into a posture that should strain, should ache, should show somewhere in the tension of his body.
Bruising deepens the violence of his face from where he was attacked yesterday. There are wires on him today, too. Thin adhesive pads bloom against his skin: at the throat, the wrists, beneath his collarbone. I follow the leads to a machine. Something cold opens in my stomach.
The guards drop him into the chair. I watch for a stumble, but he stills immediately without trouble. They strap him down.
My pulse shifts before my thoughts do, tightening low in my body in a way I don’t want to examine too closely.
“Good morning, Deogal,” Peter says into the microphone.
There’s no response.
Peter eases back, fingers moving across the desk as he taps the mouse, the monitor flickering awake. He reaches for a small control box, its coloured buttons catching the light as he turns it once in his hand.
Then he leans in again close enough that his breath clouds faintly against the metal grille. “Stand down.”
The guards move at once, boots striking in unison as they file out. The door seals behind them with a soft, airtight hiss that seems to press in on the room rather than close it off.
Silence follows.
Peter’s hand comes to rest beside the control box, his eyes locked on Deogal as if he’s waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet. He casts a look over at us.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Peter,” my voice comes out thinner than I want it to. “What is that?”
He glances me.
“Encouragement,” he says, then turns back.
“Last chance to save yourself some discomfort” he says. “Give me a name of another victim.”
Nothing.
“One location.”
Nothing.
“One honest answer.”
He flips the switch.
The first jolt is small, testing. Deogal’s body reacts before his face does, a sharp involuntary jerk, fingers locking white around the restraints. The monitor spikes, then settles.
Peter doesn’t blink. “Why did you use blue thread?”
The second shock hits harder. Deogal arches against the chair, chains shrieking as the force of him pulls against the metal. His jaw clenches. A vein rises in his neck.
Still no sound.
Not a plea.
Not a curse.
“Where are the others?” Peter asks, calm as a man discussing paperwork.
The third shock takes him completely. His body seizes, every muscle pulled tight in a way that looks less like movement and more like something being forced through him, his head snapping back as the restraint holds him in place.
Sweat gathers at his temple and slips slowly down.
My chest lurches violently. I jolt as though electricity is pulling through my nerves too.
“What are you protecting?” Peter asks.
He doesn’t even get a chance to answer this time. The dial is cranked up, and another blow is delivered.
Deogal’s entire body jerks. His grip is violent; fingers curled angrily into his shoulders as if to fight the pain, his head is forced backwards involuntarily, jaw clenched so tightly I swear I can hear teeth shattering.
The monitor spikes, sharp and brutal.
Peter watches him with a terrible focus.
“What are you waiting for?” Peter grinds out.
I don’t realise I’ve stopped breathing until Peter lifts his hand. There’s a pause. And then he moves his hand again.
“Peter,” I say under my breath before I can stop it.
The next shock drives through him. Heat lifts from his skin, a faint haze forming where it meets the cold air, while the machine climbs into a high, grating whine that presses into the room.
Peter goes still in a way I now recognise as dangerous. He stares at the monitor, then at Deogal, then back again as if one of them has failed to behave properly.
“Why the fuck isn’t it working?” Mike reaches over, adjusting the dial.
Sean frowns and follows him. The three of them close around the machine, all attention dragged to the data as if numbers might explain what the body refuses to.
I can’t pull my focus from him. The way his body gives to the restraint, curls clinging to damp skin, heat flushed deep enough to stain.
Hours drag past, swollen and distorted, but my heartbeat keeps insisting no time has moved at all. And then something changes.
A small movement catches at the edge of my vision and my attention snaps toward it before I can stop myself.
His head is lifting.
My stomach drops hard enough to hurt.
His gaze finds mine. Immediately. There’s no hesitation, no searching. Just...straight to me.
My heart slams so violently against my ribs it almost feels painful.
It’s impossible. The glass between us is thick enough to stop bullets. Reinforced and one-way. Designed specifically to sever eye contact.
But he’s looking directly at me.
And those eyes—God.
They don’t look human. Black enough to swallow the light around them whole, endless in a way my brain can’t settle around properly. Looking into them feels wrong immediately, like standing too close to the edge of a cliff and realising something down there is looking back.
My lungs forget how to work.
I feel exposed suddenly.
My breathing breaks mid-inhale and doesn’t recover properly. For a second—just a second—I feel it again. Something drags low along my spine, slow and deliberate, like it knows exactly where to go.
Every nerve in my body ignites.
His mouth shifts, curving into a smile. A slow, devastating slash of lips that carves me open. He edges forward so slowly, so minimally, that I’m convinced I imagined it.
I don’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
His lips part.
He’s going to speak. I know it with the kind of certainty that makes my whole body tighten around the moment. My body leans into it without permission.
God help me, I wait for him.
A bead of sweat slips down the back of my neck. My gaze flicks, quick to the others—Peter, the monitors. They’re distracted. Not a single one looks up.
I try to find my voice, but it fails.
There is a wrongness to it now, something I can feel even as I stay exactly where I am. This isn’t anticipation. It’s something deeper, something that doesn’t belong to me. But the silence stretches. My attention snaps back to him, but then...he looks away.
Like he’s finished with me.
Bored of me.
The thought drops hard enough to feel physical.
The edges of the room suddenly feel closer. The lights sit wrong against my eyes, too bright, too clean, like they’re pressing down instead of illuminating.
I draw in a breath. It doesn’t go deep enough. I try again but it’s still wrong. It catches somewhere halfway, like my body has forgotten how to complete it properly.
I look back at the men, at the computers. I open my mouth to tell them, but nothing comes out.
Because the second I try to say it out loud, it already sounds impossible.
He looked at me.
My pulse stumbles hard enough to make me feel briefly sick.
Because if I say it now, if I break the silence just to tell them the prisoner briefly lifted his eyes, Peter’s going to look at me like I’m overreacting again.
Like I’m letting him get into my head. And the humiliating part is that I can already hear how thin it sounds compared to the weight it had inside me.
He looked at me. That’s all.
Except my body won’t believe that’s all it was.
Because I can still feel the exact weight of his attention like it was marking me.
The ache under my ribs deepens, slow and insistent, something that feels uncomfortably close to wanting, and the realisation of it makes heat rise up my throat, sharp and humiliating.
I shouldn’t feel like this.
Not here.
Not about him.
But it sits there anyway, lodged too deep to dislodge, spreading through everything else until I can’t separate it from the rest of me.