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Cem was right that I’d tried to escape on a leg that had no strength. I’d fought back tears full of horror as I’d unwrapped the bandage around my calf one night, coming face-to-face with what they’d done to me.
Half my muscle was missing. Streaks of darkness still marbled its way through my remaining flesh, hinting the infection had been bad.
I hadn’t been thinking.
I’d just wanted to run.
I missed Neri with all my heart and miserable fucking soul.
I let anger give me energy, and it’d only taken an hour to jimmy the lock with a safety pin and metal nail file I found in the bathroom and open the door. I limped through the dark. I’d hope I would be free to disappear into the night. However, I only made it half-way down the corridor before I’d been knocked to my knees by a diligent guard and then carried like a dead deer back to bed. I’d tried to knock out the next guard who delivered my breakfast, desperate to steal a phone so I could call Neri.
But my strike hadn’t been strong enough. The guard had struck me back.
I’d spent the next few days nursing a black eye.
Cem Kara never came to see me again.
He said he would give me four days, but those four days had turned into weeks as my system remained stubbornly sick.
I wasn’t healed yet, but...it seemed my father had run out of patience.
I sat up in the thick musty-smelling furs. I blinked at the new room I’d been given. Not that it could be called a room. More like a cave. Or a catacomb. Memories of travelling with my parents when I was little—before Melike had been born—came to mind.
We’d travelled to Cappadocia and spent hours exploring the caverns, caves, and underground pathways of Derinkuyu, the supposed oldest city in Turkey. I remembered the trip so clearly because I’d run off and gotten lost in the narrow, cold, and crowded corridors.
Turkey had hundreds of underground cities. Derinkuyu was spread over almost five-hundred kilometres, but there were over two hundred similar places. Most of them with one, two, and three layers of habitation beneath the earth, creating a metropolis hidden in the ground.
Is that where he’s brought me?
Are we even in Istanbul anymore?
I glared at the little niches cut into the wall. Electric lights flickered, blending modern with ancient. The floor was uneven with chisel marks and a rudimentary table and chairs sat in the centre. A low archway led to an identical cave beyond with a toilet in one corner, a wash bucket, a drain in the middle of the floor, and a towering cabinet pressed up against the back wall. A large bronze padlock hung off its metal rings, keeping the lattice doors closed.
What the hell is in there?
Where the fuck are we?
My heart picked up its pace.
At least that part of me had healed enough that it didn’t skip and trip so often.
I was driven by panic to tell Neri I was okay.
Haunted by dread that if I didn’t run soon, I might never be able to.
My body blazed, my bones ached, and the very idea of fighting my way out of this place was fucking laughable.
I was useless.
Helpless.
Trapped.
The doctor’s eyes landed on me from across the small cave. He winced as if apologising for what would happen, then bowed at Cem. “If the lessons are short, he should be okay.” He tripped over his words. “But...only short, mind you. His system cannot handle much before a secondary infection could spread—”
“I will keep them short.” Cem nodded and held out his hand. “Now, do you have the paternity results?”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Fumbling in his black satchel hanging off his hunched shoulder, the doctor passed Cem an envelope.
Ripping it open, Cem’s gaze scanned the page before he grinned. “That’s all for now, Çetin. You will be summoned if required.”
“As you wish, efendim.”
“You two stay,” Cem commanded, narrowing his eyes at the guards standing by the only exit—a barred metal door that looked suspiciously like the bars of a prison cell.
Not saying goodbye to the doctor, Cem marched toward me on the fur-lined bed before tossing the paperwork on my lap. I caught it before it fluttered to the ground and skimmed the Turkish text.
A lot of numbers in neat columns. A lot of duplicate digits and scientific speak before the conclusion that I already knew but choked on anyway: The man tested is the biological father of the child. The probability of paternity in this case is 99.99%.
Well, fuck.
Cem chuckled. “It’s a day of good news. Now that you have evidence that we are, in fact, related, are you willing to see where you came from? To accept that you carry a part of me inside you and are destined to become a man so much greater than what you were prepared to settle for?”
