The second man doesn't even turn all the way around.
Third floor.
The corridor is concrete and dim and smells like damp and chemicals and underneath it, faint but there, something that stops me for exactly one second.
Her. Her scent. Warm skin and clean soap and underneath it my sheets. My sheets that she's been wearing like a second skin for days.
She's here.
She's here.
I find the door.
And then I hear her scream.
The sound detonates below my ribs and turns the world a single color.
I go through the door like a war.
21
SERAFINA
Iwake up in pieces.
Smell first. Damp concrete, antiseptic, the specific cold of a space that's been underground long enough to forget sunlight exists.
Then sound. My own breathing is too shallow. Male voices somewhere behind the door. Low, unhurried. The voices of men who think they have time.
They don't.
Then sensation. Wrists zip-tied to a metal chair. Ankles the same. Head thick and throbbing with the chemical hangover of whatever they pressed to my face in that gallery, while Luca reached for me across the floor with blood soaking through his shirt and murder in his eyes.
Shit.
I open mine.
Concrete walls. Single overhead light. Industrial, anonymous — the architecture of a place designed to be forgotten.
I am a trauma surgeon. I know what happens to people in rooms like this.
I start mapping.
Door to my left. Heavy, metal, hinged outward. Anyone coming through it has a half-second blind spot on entry. One guard visible through the narrow window, back turned. Second voice to the right, off frame. Two confirmed. One probable.
My wrists are bound in front of me. The choice of someone confident in the room, not in the restraint.
Rookie mistake.
And there is a scalpel taped to my left ankle.
I've carried it for years. Not for this. For the general principle my father taught me:know your exits.And what my mother taught me before she died:exits without tools are just wishes.Number ten blade in a rubber sheath, flat against my skin under the gown hem, invisible to anyone who searches with confidence instead of thoroughness.
They searched with confidence.
I start working on the zip tie.
Not frantically. Frantically is for people who haven't thought it through. I find the weakest point in the plastic — the seam where the ratchet mechanism sits — and work it with the same precise economy I use when I'm closing a chest. Controlled. Patient. The cold metal bites through silk.
