I try to hold it in, but the laughter keeps bleeding out, shaky, broken, too loud in the silence he is trying to control. It isn’t joy. It is defiance scraping its nails down the walls of my throat.
He doesn’t like that.
His hand comes down hard on my back, right across the line of fresh stitches.
Pain explodes through my ribs, white-hot and instant, blinding enough to suck the air out of my lungs. A gasp tears from me before I can swallow it, and the laugh chokes off into silence.
He presses harder.
“There you go,” he murmurs. “Back with us.”
Tears sting at the corners of my eyes. One of the sutures has torn, I can feel it. A slow, hot burn blooms beneath the skin.
“Since you think Seth is coming to save you,” Elliot goes on, circling behind me, his voice low and disturbingly calm, “that puts a little fire under me. Makes me want to move things along.”
He leans down, and I feel his breath brush against the side of my face.
“John may act like he cares about you,” he whispers. “But he doesn’t. If you die, he’ll be annoyed. Maybe he’ll say something poetic about wasted potential. But one dead bitch isn’t going to topple The Collective.”
His fingers drag slowly up my spine, right over the torn sutures, making sure I feel every inch of it.
“You need to understand something, Brooke. No one is coming for you.”
My jaw locks. I don’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. I won’t.
“You’re mine now,” he continues, his voice softening. “Mine to break. Mine to cut open. And when I’m finished with you—”
He bends lower, his lips brushing the shell of my ear.
“I’ll send what’s left to Seth. In pieces… I wonder which parts he’ll want to keep.”
My stomach turns. A wave of nausea crawls up my throat.
But I still don’t look away.
Before I can react, Elliot strikes me again. His hand snaps across my back, landing directly over the torn sutures. Pain detonates through me, shreddingthrough nerves until sound collapses into a strangled cry in my throat. My body jerks forward, helpless against it.
Elliot straightens and wipes his palm against his pants, like touching me contaminated him.
“Take them downstairs,” he says to the guards. “Cleaning time.”
Elliot pauses at the doorway and looks back at me.
“And Brooke,” he smiles, “I hope you’re ready for tomorrow’s game.”
Then he turns and disappears into the corridor, his laughter echoing faintly before the hall swallows it whole.
I stay where I am, shaking, pain ripping through my back, my wrists, my ribs.
But beneath the agony, beneath the terror, one truth burns through everything else.
Seth is alive.
And he is coming.
They can hurt me. They can cut me open. They can stitch me wrong and drag me through hell itself. But they have not broken me.
Guards seize us by the arms and shoulders, dragging us toward the stairwell. No one fights. No one can.
