My fingers found the Rubik’s cube in my pocket. Started turning.Click, click.But my hands were shaking too badly. The cube slipped, hit the elevator floor, the sound ricocheting off the walls, and I was gone. Back in the basement. The door locked. The men upstairs. Nobody coming. Nobody was coming to saveme.
No one came for eleven days. I didn’t know that yet, but my body did. My body remembered every hour, every zip tie, every second of waiting in the dark for someone who wasn’t there.
My knees gave out. I went down hard, palms flat against the elevator floor—cold, gritty, every surface a catalog of contamination my brain couldn't stop running even now. Hundreds of shoes a day. Bacteria. Everything I spent my life avoiding, pressed right into my skin. But that voice was small and far away, drowned out by the rest of it. The dark. The walls. Each breath shorter than the last. And the certainty, bone-deep, that I was going to die in this box the way I was supposed to die in that one.
"Mr. Hunter."
A voice. Far away, like hearing someone through concrete.
"Mr. Hunter. Jace."
She called for me again. "Jace. I need you to hear me. Can you hear me?"
My name. The voice saying it was calm in a way that didn't belong in the dark, didn't belong anywhere near the basement or the men or the sound of heavy footsteps on concrete stairs. But it was there. Warm. Getting closer, like someone walking toward me through the worst thing I'd ever lived through without being afraid of it.
Small fingers against my jaw, cool against the sweat on my skin. Her hand was steady, and I could feel my own pulse hammering against her palm.
Every nerve in my body fired. Twenty-four years of wiring snapping awake at once, and suddenly I wasn't in the elevator anymore.
A hand closing around a boy's neck in the dark, squeezing until the air stops and the edges of everything go black. And after—his mother finds the bruises days later. Pressing her face into her hands and crying while she thought he was sleeping.
But this hand didn’t grip. It rested against my jaw, so light I could barely feel it.
And it smelled like vanilla.
Vanilla wasn't in the basement. Vanilla was a Saturday morning at a market. A woman who called me a pervert and meant it. Lips that tasted sweet when they crashed into mine. Hands held up, fingers spread, showing me they were clean. Her voice, drunk and absurd, telling me her chest was harmless. Soft like clouds. That they couldn’t hurt anyone.
Vanilla was safe. My brain grabbed that classification and held on with everything it had.
"Breathe with me," she said. Her voice was close, close enough that I could feel her exhale warm against my skin.
"In. One. Two. Three. Four."
She breathed with me. Slow, steady, loud enough for me to follow in the dark. Either she'd done this before, or she was pretending she had. The pretending was good enough.
"In. One. Two. Three. Four."
I tried. The air came in jagged, thin and not enough.
"Out. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six."
Her hand stayed on my jaw. Her other hand found mine on the floor. She didn’t grab it. She just placed her fingers over mine, barely touching, giving me the option to pull away.
I didn’t pull away.
"Again. In. One. Two. Three. Four."
She counted. I breathed. The basement receded. Inch by inch, like a tide going out, the walls pushed back to where they belonged and the air thinned and my lungs remembered how to work. Her voice was the anchor. The only fixed point in a darkness that was trying to swallow me whole.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Minutes. Maybe longer. Her counting, me breathing, both of us sitting on the floor of a broken elevator in the dark.
Then the lights came back.
Fluorescent white, blinding after the black. I blinked, then squinted. The elevator was small, ordinary, and definitely not a basement. The doors were still closed. The maintenance alarm was beeping somewhere above us.
I was on the floor, shirt damp with sweat, glasses fogged, and hands trembling.
Then something trickled from my nostril.
