Page 32 of Corrado

Alessio didn’t turn at the sound of Cree’s voice, but he did look back through the one-way glass to see Corrado being pulled out of the water, almost entirely unconscious, but not quite. Just almost.

“Watching,” Alessio murmured.

“You shouldn’t be down here.”

“I know.”

Cree came to stand next to him and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “He’s going to be difficult … to break, I mean. His pride holds him back. All of that has to go … the pride, dignity … the harder it is to take those things from him, the longer this process goes on.”

Yeah.

He knew that, too.

“What about the other one?” Alessio asked, glancing over his shoulder at the dark room where Chris was having his rotation. “How did that go in the tank?”

“He about broke the fucking top trying to get out, one of the jacket’s arms came undone … I have never seen someone fight that hard against it, and I have seen some things happen down in these rooms.”

“Adrenaline?”

“Likely,” Cree returned. “His second rotation in the tank starts tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes, or if we get a different result.”

Of course.

Alessio knew how this went.

Break the body; break the mind.

“As for you,” the man said next to him, “you don’t need to be down here reliving your own time in these rooms because you feel something for one of the two currently experiencing theirs. You realize that, don’t you?”

He did.

All Alessio could think to reply was, “But shouldn’t I?”

“Stay down.”

Corrado didn’t.

His knees ached, and his legs shook so badly he was sure they were going to give out the second he put all of his weight back onto them, but he still forced his body back up. Back to his feet, he didn’t stand quite as straight as he did the last ten times, not when he couldn’t breathe doing it.

The straighter his spine, the worse the pain became. He trembled from the top of his head to his toes pressing against cold, damp cement. The amount of effort it took to pull his body up from the ground that time was clearly more than he realized.

Would he be able to do it again?

Corrado didn’t know.

Fuck him if he wouldn’t try.

Keeping his hands resting against his knees to give him a bit more support so he didn’t topple over entirely—that was not happening—he took a few quick inhales to try and soothe the pain flaring in his side.

Was that his fucking kidney?

His ribs?

A collapsed lung?

All of the above?

Likely.