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“Hey. Ally?”

I blinked into the damp and dark, jolting upright.

My mind screamed at the sudden movement, pain unlike anything else ripping through me from within, sawing down my spine like a blade.

Frantically, I surveyed my surroundings.

A cell of some kind.

Not white.

Dark.

The air hung thick with mildew, blood, and fear. I had been here before, though I could not say when. The doctor was gone.

Blinking through the fog in my vision, I turned toward the shadow—a towering outline against the bars.

I was not afraid.

The figure was somehow comforting.

“Ally, look at me,” he said, and the strangest certainty settled over me: we had done this before. A routine, perhaps. “Breathe, Alvara.”

That lilt? Where did I know that lilt?

Whatever the slant to his words, I obeyed. The shadow tossed something toward me—fabric of some kind.

I looked down. Linen pants covered my legs, and a band wrapped my chest, binding my breasts. Nothing else.

My head spun, the world along with it.

“Put it on,” the shadow instructed. I looked at the thing balled in my hands, gingerly untangling it until I found…

A shirt.

The shadow had given me a shirt.

A sinking certainty told me we had done this before, too.

“Focus, Ally. What’d they do this time?” he demanded, as though I should understand any of it. “Moros,” he supplied, trepidation sharpening his tone. “What did he want?”

A flash of white.

Black eyes.

A searing agony.

A scream that tore me apart from the inside until I was sure my ears would bleed.

“Focus, Ally. You’re back. You’re safe. What did he want?”

Anchor. The shadow was trying to be an anchor. The word surfaced from somewhere deep. A beautiful bear of a man with a smile I could not help but mirror had taught it to me. That… technique.

It was something we used to bring souls back into themselves after trauma.

Booming—that warrior’s laugh. Like sunlight punching through darkness.

An inexplicable sadness settled over my shoulders.