CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dinner is quieter than it should be.
Not peaceful—never that. Just controlled. Every movement measured, every sound dulled beneath the weight of the men seated around the table. Their voices stay low, conversations slipping in and out of topics I’m not meant to follow—money, shipments, names that don’t belong in daylight.
I stand where I was placed.
Not at the table. Never at the table.
Just behind and to the side of the Warden’s chair, close enough to serve, far enough to be ignored. Or at least, that’s what I’m supposed to be.
Ignored.
But I feel it anyway—the glances that linger too long, the quiet assessments, the way one of the men smirks like he’s already decided something about me I wasn’t part of.
The Warden doesn’t acknowledge any of it.
He sits composed, controlled, one gloved hand resting near his glass, the other occasionally lifting as he speaks. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t need to. His awareness stretches further than his gaze ever does.
Waiting.
There’s a rhythm to this. A script I’ve learned, piece by piece. When to move. When to pour. When to disappear into stillness so completely I almost believe I’ve succeeded.
Almost.
“Answer him.”
The command is quiet, but it cuts clean through the room.
I don’t hesitate. I don’t question which him. I already know.
It is a slip. One breath too soft, too thoughtless. One moment of forgetting who I am supposed to be.
“Yes,” I say. Just yes. Not Yes, Sir. Not the title I am required to staple to the end of every answer, every breath.
The Warden doesn’t correct me.
He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t strike me across the face or demand I fix it.
He simply turns. Slowly. Gradually. And looks at me.
The mask gives nothing away, but the air changes—tightens—like the room itself begins to suffocate.
The other girls freeze, their eyes dropping to the floor, their hands trembling around trays and linens.
The kind of stillness that only comes when you know pain is about to follow.
The Warden doesn’t speak. He only nods once.
Two guards step out from the shadows like ghosts. They don’t grab me violently. Don’t yank or drag me.
Their hands grip beneath my arms like I am cargo, something to be relocated. My feet skim the floor as they move me through the corridor, and I don’t fight them.
Fighting only makes it worse. Fighting means reminders. I know better. I know what this is. We aren’t heading toward the dorms or the chambers or even the staff halls. No, we turn left. Down the hallway painted a darker shade of gray than the others.
I know this corridor. We all do. It is the one they speak of in murmurs—when no one is listening. The place they send girls who forget too many times, who crack in the wrong places, who resist when they are meant to kneel. They call it The Quiet Room.
When the guards open the door, the cold hits first. It is sterile, dead, and unnatural. Like walking into the belly of something that no longer breathes.
There is no light. No window. No echo. Just a floor and four walls, and a blackness so thick it swallows me whole the moment they push me inside and seal the lock behind me.
I stand still. For a long time. Waiting for something. A sound. A light. A voice. But there is nothing.
I whisper once—just to hear something besides my own heartbeat—but the darkness devours the sound before it reaches the air.
Then my sense of space—of the room, of the table, of the men watching—starts to slip out of reach. It doesn’t collapse all at once. It fades, like the edges of everything are being pulled away from me, leaving only the center where his gaze holds.
Time does the same thing next. Not stopping. Not speeding. Just…loosening, like it no longer belongs to me.
I sink to the floor eventually. My legs give out, or I let them—I’m not sure which anymore. The line between the two doesn’t feel sharp enough to matter.
The impact is quiet. Controlled. Like even falling here has rules I don’t remember agreeing to.
My fingers find the seams of the dress over and over again—the same one the Warden had us wear—tracing the stitching like it might keep me anchored to something real.
I don’t think about it at first. I just do it.
Up and down. Up and down. The motion repeats like a loop I can disappear into, like if I follow it long enough I might find my way back into myself.
I count. I recite the names of the girls who had vanished. I whisper the names of the men I hate. The ones who made me. The ones who broke me.
And then…I whisper his name.
Montgomery.
Over and over, until it doesn’t sound like a name anymore. Until it hurts too much to say.
Then another name, softer, more distant, but somehow even heavier.
“Shoomaker,” I whisper, the name catching on my dry lips.
“Shoomaker… please.”
I remember his hand, the way it wrapped around mine after the compound raid all those years ago. The way he held my gaze like I was still a person, not a piece of evidence. The way he draped his jacket around my shoulders like I was cold, not ruined.
I remember his face. The pain in his eyes. The guilt in his voice when he promised we were going to be okay.
Had he gotten my email? Had he read it and thought of me? Had he deleted it without opening it? Or worse…had he read it and decided I wasn’t worth saving again?
I don’t know how long I stay curled up there in the dark. Hours. Days. I lose the ability to measure it, to name it, to place it anywhere that makes sense. Time doesn’t live in a place like this—it doesn’t pass so much as decay. Slowly. Quietly. Taking pieces with it each time it shifts.
Eventually, I stop speaking.
My voice gives out first—too raw, too scraped down to anything usable. My throat stays dry no matter how much I swallow, like even sound has been rationed out of me.
Then my thoughts start to thin.
I stop reaching for memories. Stop replaying names, moments, anything that might stitch me back into something whole. Even the effort of holding on starts to feel like too much.
So I don’t.
I let it go quiet.
I let the dark hollow me out until there’s nothing left pushing back against it.
When the door opens, the light feels like violence. It burns into my skull and bleeds behind my eyelids, but I don’t cover my face. I can’t. I just blink, slow and heavy, as a silhouette steps into the room.
The Warden. The mask. The scent of clean leather and cold metal. He crouches beside me, tilting his head like I am a specimen. A project. He doesn’t speak right away. He just watches me shake. Watches the tears I don’t know I’m crying. And then finally—he speaks.
“What do you say?”
It takes me three tries to get the words out.
“I…I forgot to say ‘Sir.’”
He nods slowly. “Good girl.”
He doesn’t praise like someone giving comfort. He praises like a mechanic, satisfied with a machine that finally obeys again.
He stands and walks to the door.
He doesn’t look back.
And I follow because I don’t know how not to anymore.