CHAPTER 3
MARGARITA
The slam of the heavy iron door didn't just rattle my eardrums; it vibrated straight through the bones in my jaw.
It was a dense, suffocating thud that cut off every single sound from the outside world in a millisecond.
The high-speed violence of the car chase, the deafening crack of gunfire on the wet pavement, the revving engines—all of it just vanished, replaced by an absolute, pitch-black sensory vacuum.
I stood perfectly still in the dead center of the room, my pulse hammering so hard in my throat I felt like I was swallowing a heartbeat.
I waited for my eyes to adjust, but there was nothing to adjust to.
Total absence of light. I lifted my hands, my fingers trembling slightly as I rubbed the raw, red skin around my wrists where the zip-ties had been biting into me for the last hour.
The friction burned, a stinging reminder that this wasn't a nightmare I was going to wake up from. It was real. I was here.
"Is anyone there?" I asked the darkness. My voice sounded thin, swallowed instantly by the concrete.
I took a blind step forward, my bare feet freezing against the floor.
"Locked... of course it's locked." The absolute audacity of this man.
I pull a literal bullet out of his liver, stitch his organs back together while he aims a goddamn gun at my thigh, and his way of saying thank you is tossing me into a dungeon. "Think, Margarita. Just think."
The smell hit me first. Damp concrete, old dust, and the stale scent of industrial cleanser that couldn't quite mask the phantom odor of copper.
Blood. The air tasted like adrenaline and rust. Through the soles of my feet, I could feel a distant, rhythmic hum—high-voltage machinery vibrating somewhere deep beneath the floorboards. I was buried.
A sharp, electrical pop cracked overhead, and a single industrial fluorescent light flickered to life.
I hissed, squeezing my eyes shut and shielding my face with both hands, squinting through my fingers as the sudden, harsh glare stabbed my retinas.
The light was an ugly, sterile blue, buzzing like an angry wasp.
"Brutalist nightmare," I muttered, dropping my hands. "At least I can see my own hands now."
I took in the cage. It wasn't a room; it was a vault.
Four poured-concrete walls, zero windows, zero vents.
The ceiling was uncomfortably high, designed explicitly to make whoever was standing down here feel microscopic and entirely disposable.
There was a central floor drain right in the middle of the room, and bolted to the floor in the corner was a skeletal metal bed frame with a paper-thin mattress.
Near the lip of the floor drain, I spotted it—a tiny, ancient speck of brown crust. Bloodstain. Not mine.
My medical brain clocked it immediately. This wasn't a holding cell. It was a professional-grade interrogation room. The environment was calculated. Damon didn't just throw me in a random closet; he had a system for people like me. He built this place to break people.
I crossed the room in three strides, my bare feet slapping the freezing floor, and approached the solid iron door.
It was a monolithic slab of painted steel that looked like it had been ripped off the hull of a battleship.
No handle. No keypad. No seams. Not even a millimeter of give where a person could wedge a fingernail, let alone pick a lock.
The physics of the room were entirely stacked against me.
I pressed the side of my face flat against the freezing metal, holding my breath. I strained to hear a scuff of a boot, a cough, a radio click—anything to tell me there was a guard stationed on the other side. Nothing. The silence out there was heavier than the silence in here.
I slammed my open palms against the steel. "Hello? Damon!" I yelled, my voice cracking with a sudden, vicious spike of anger. "You can't just keep me in here."
I hit the door again, harder this time, feeling the sting travel all the way up to my elbows. "Answer me, you bastard!"
The complete lack of response felt like a physical blow.
Panic, the dirty, crawling kind that bypasses logic and goes straight to the lizard brain, finally breached my defenses.
My breathing hitched, turning into shallow, frantic gasps that didn't fill my lungs.
The walls suddenly felt like they were inching inward.
I started pacing the perimeter. Six steps to the right wall.
Turn. Six steps to the left wall. Turn. My hands clawed aimlessly at the air, trying to grab onto some kind of invisible leverage.
I was spiraling. If I stayed in this mental loop, I was going to have a full-blown breakdown on his concrete floor, and there was zero chance I was giving him the satisfaction. I needed a task.
"One, two, three... breathe," I whispered to myself, staring down at my feet.
I started counting the uneven gray tiles around the drain.
Four, five, six. My big toe caught hard on a jagged lip of concrete near the metal grate, making me stumble.
I caught my balance, swearing under my breath.
"Don't lose it. If you lose it, you're dead. "
The thought of Damon sitting in some high-tech security room, watching me pace like a trapped zoo animal on a grainy camera feed, made me physically sick.
He was probably drinking expensive scotch, fully recovered from the surgery I performed on him, enjoying the show.
The sheer unhinged arrogance of the man.
Then, the image flashed in my brain—Briggs.
My guard. My only friend in that rotting underground clinic.
The memory hit me with visceral force: Briggs’s throat torn open, his blood pooling over my combat boots while I desperately tried to clamp the artery.
The panic inside me vanished in an instant, instantly incinerated by a cold, surgical fury.
Grief is useless here, but vengeance? Vengeance is a hell of a survival mechanism.
I stopped pacing. I looked down at my blood-stained scrub top. I brought my arm up and traced the dried, flaking crust of Briggs's blood on my sleeve. My jaw locked. I dug my fingernails so deeply into my own palms that I felt the skin break, the sharp pain completely grounding me.
"He's not going to win," I told the empty room, my voice dropping an octave, completely stripped of fear. "I’ve seen men like him bleed before."
My medical knowledge was a map. I spent years learning exactly how bodies function, how they heal, and most importantly, how they break. A fortress is just a body. Architecture is just bones and tissue. "Everything has a failure point."
I turned my back to the door and started a methodical, anatomical assessment of my cage. I wasn't looking for an exit anymore. I was looking for a weakness.
I dropped to my knees by the center drain, the grit of the concrete dust biting into my bare skin. I ran my fingers over the weld-points of the heavy iron grate, feeling the cold, unforgiving metal. "Too solid. Too clean," I muttered, brushing the dirt off my knees as I stood up.
I moved to the walls, running my hands along the faint grout lines of the poured concrete, searching for a hollow spot.
I stared up at the buzzing fluorescent light fixture, feeling the static electricity make the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
Nothing. The bastard loved his brutalist aesthetic, and it showed.
But brutalism emphasizes overwhelming strength, which means the details are usually where the builders get lazy.
"There has to be a flaw," I whispered, my eyes scanning the corners. "Show yourself."
My gaze locked onto the bed. It wasn't a custom piece like the door. It was a mass-produced, skeletal industrial frame. Cheap. Utilitarian.
I walked over to it and got down on my hands and knees, crawling straight under the thin, piss-yellow stained mattress.
The smell of stale sweat and old fear hit me, but I ignored it, dragging myself into the cold shadow beneath the frame.
I inspected the support brackets where the metal slats met the legs.
I reached up, grabbing the hem of my scrub top, and used the rough cotton to aggressively wipe away a thick layer of dust and grime from the headboard bracket. I squinted in the low light. Right there. A hairline fracture in the metal, right where the welding was uneven and pitted.
"Poor craftsmanship. Thank you, Damon," I breathed, a dark, feral thrill shooting through my chest.
I pulled myself out from under the bed and stood up. I needed torque. I grabbed the headboard with both hands, wedging my bare foot against the concrete wall and my other foot against the base of the bedpost to anchor myself. I pulled.
The metal gave a loud, screeching groan—a horrific noise of steel grinding on steel that sounded like a gunshot echoing off the bare walls. I froze, my heart leaping into my throat. The noise was deafening. Every creak felt like a goddamn alarm bell ringing down the hallway.
"Quiet. Stay quiet," I hissed through my teeth, looking back at the door. Nobody came.
I looked at my hands. The edges of the bracket were serrated and sharp. If I pulled harder, I’d slice my palms open to the bone. I grabbed the hem of my undershirt, gripping it in both hands, and wrapped the fabric thickly around my palms to act as makeshift gloves.
I got back into position. "Damn it, move!" I grunted, throwing my entire body weight backward. My shoulder muscles screamed in protest, burning like fire. The vibration of the protesting steel traveled straight up my arms and into my jaw, rattling my teeth. "Just a little more pressure."
"Please... snap."
With a sickening, violent crack, the metal fatigued and gave way. I stumbled backward, landing hard on my ass on the concrete, clutching my prize.