They marked me. That was their first mistake.
The second is letting me live.
Chapter 16
Brooke
They drag me upstairs like a corpse.
My heels scrape along the stairs. Every jolt sends a lightning bolt through my spine and tears something fresh open in my back. By the time they shove me through the physician’s door, I can feel warm blood sliding beneath my dress.
The physician doesn’t bother greeting me. He doesn’t bother acknowledging I’m a person.
His gaze goes straight to the wound like it’s a puzzle he’s impatient to solve.
He touches the torn edges with two fingers. He isn’t gentle. Just clinical pressure that sends a hot shock ripping through my torso so violently my knees nearly buckle. Something metallic floods my mouth, copper and spit and the instinct to bite down on my own tongue before I scream.
“She tore several sutures,” he gestures. “Hold her still.”
The guards seize my arms, forcing me still, back exposed. My shoulder joints scream. My breath stutters.
The physician threads a needle the length of my damn finger. The metal flashes under the light. A thin, silver threat that promises nothing but suffering.
He doesn’t say a word before he pushes it in.
The needle punches through torn skin and muscle, sliding through me like wire through raw meat. The sting is immediate, hot enough to make black spots burst behind my eyelids. My spine pulses, nerves firing in frantic, wrong directions. The pain isn’t sharp, it’s invasive.
He pulls the needle through in one long drag. I feel every millimeter of it scraping through tissue that isn’t ready to be touched.
My jaw locks so tight my teeth ache. I breathe through my nose.
He stitches me with cold precision, tightening each pass until it feels like my skin is being cinched shut with barbed thread. A butcher treats meat with more respect than he treats me.
“You have excellent tissue integrity,” he says dryly.
“Good, she won’t die before tomorrow’s events.” Elliot’s voice drifts from the corner.
“She’s a fighter, I like that,” he says. “Fix her properly. I need her functional tomorrow.”
The physician finishes the final stitch and wipes the blood away with antiseptic-soaked gauze. It burns like acid. My vision blurs hard enough to double the room.
“She’s stable. Take her back.”
They drag me down the hall and throw me back in the basement as if dropping off a piece of equipment.
The others look less like people and more like shadows pretending to still be alive. Bruises have bloomed into thick, mottled purples. Lips split. Eyes sunken. Every breath seems like it costs them something they can’t afford.
Miles shifts first. He crawls toward me slowly, one palm dragging across the concrete, his other arm wrapped around his ribs.
“Are you okay?”
I let out a brittle laugh that scrapes my throat raw. “As okay as I can be in this hellhole.”
He gives a weak nod.
“I’m pregnant.”
Miles blinks. “How far along?”
