Page 204 of Alessio

If he never saw bamboo again, it would be a great day for him. He’d decided. Not that he had time to think on that for too long.

He was on the floor again, blinking up at darkness and choking on the laughter that crawled its way out of his throat. The sound of his own distress and sardonic amusement echoed in the space, reverberating back to his spot on the cold, damp floor to taunt him.

Except he liked that sound.

It was better than the hell he usually found here.

“Stay down,” he was told again.

Fuck that.

Corrado rolled over to his knees despite the way his entire body protested at the action. There was pain, and then there was agony. Some people liked to use those words interchangeably like they were the same things.

Here, he learned they were not.

He wished he felt simple pain, now.

Only pain.

Instead, he felt agony—straight, pure agony everywhere. And not just from the beatings … not just from the way his body felt broken, and ready to be done with this. No, because inside his mind, and in his heart, it was as though he were being torn in two.

The part that wanted to stop.

The part that needed to continue.

They would not break him.

He would not beg.

But fuck … were they going to kill him trying?

He didn’t know.

“God, stay down,” he heard somewhere behind him.

Corrado couldn’t.

That wasn’t how he was made.

They could take the rest of it from him—a lot of it, they already had. Should they want his dignity so he wouldn’t understand what shame felt like? Fine, take it. If they needed his body to learn to enjoy pain and discomfort so it could never be used against him? Great, they had that now. Did they need to take his emotions and twist them like his dark thoughts, lost to blackened walls and the water that rushed into his lungs every time they put him in the tank? Okay, he no longer cared.

But not his pride.

That was his.

There were times when the darkness of the rooms seemed like an old friend to Corrado. He found comfort in the rooms when he was totally alone—when the time bled together because he no longer knew what day it was.

Ha.

That was funny.

He had no clue how long he’d been doing this.

Days?

Weeks?

Months?