The Luna You Betrayed Is No Longer Yours

Chapter 133: Chapter 133 Her next move

_Rowena’s POV_

They were organized about their torturing.

No shouting or anger. No one making it personal. They moved through it the way people moved through tasks they had done before and had a method for. That was the part that stayed with me the most. The fact that it felt like work to them. Beating someone to a pulp was nothing but work.

Cruelty with feeling in it was one thing. You could find the edges of it, push back against it, use the emotion against the person doing it. This had no edges to find at all. It was just a system running. They were like damn robots taking orders.

I had eaten what they brought me earlier because my body needed it and refusing would have cost more than it was worth. That turned out to be wrong. When the first hit connected, my body made a decision my mind hadn’t agreed to and everything came back up.

I went down on one knee but the knee didn’t reach the floor thanks to the restraints.

They waited without reacting. Waiting for me to collect myself. freewёbnoνel.com

When it was done, I pushed back upright and looked at the man nearest to me and said nothing. He said something to the others and they continued.

I stopped counting at some point, not because I was losing track of where I was, I wasn’t, but because counting used something I needed somewhere else. I needed everything available for the internal place that was keeping me together.

The same place that had kept me together for three years in a household that was crumbling. The same place that held through Alice and through the unsealing and through the injuries and the investigation and the competition.

I held myself tightly as each strike landed painfully on my stomach.

It wasn’t easy. Nothing about what was happening in this room was easy. But I kept it holding by not thinking about anything except the next breath and the breath after that.

They eventually finished and someone spoke. My ears weren’t fully reliable at that point so I caught the shape of the words without the content. My legs had stopped doing what I needed them to do somewhere in the middle section of it and two of the men picked me up and carried me back rather than walking me.

They put me down on the floor of the room and left.

The door closed.

I lay still for a moment and did the count I always did. Starting at the top and moving down. Face had taken some of it, nothing structural. Ribs were the next concern, several of them making their displeasure known in ways that ranged from bruised to something worse. My stomach was the worst of it. I didn’t look directly but I could feel the damage there, deep and settled.

I breathed in through the nose, slowly, because breathing fast made the stomach worse. Out through the mouth. Again and again.

I’d even vomited everything they fed me. That was the aim, to make me throw everything up.

Just when I thought it wouldn’t get worse, the chemical pain came.

It always arrived without warning. No buildup, or signal. Just there, suddenly and completely, moving through the bones like something cold and total.

It was worse this time than any previous time. My body had less to work with after the hit and the compound knew it. It found the places where I was already damaged and made itself at home there.

I pressed my forehead against the cool floor and locked my jaw, holding the sound inside my chest because making noise felt like giving something away even with no one in the room to give it to.

I convulsed on the cold floor.

“Rowena.”

Kyra’s voice was barely a voice anymore. More like a vibration than a sound. Thin and far away and fighting to reach me through whatever the compound was doing to both of us.

“Stay with me,” she said.

I tried. I really tried to obey.

The wave passed the way it always passed. Slowly and without apology. It left my bones feeling scraped out and raw and the ache that settled in afterward was its own specific misery.

I lay on the floor and let my tears fall.

The waves came every few hours. Each one was longer than the one before. He had told me this on the first day and it had been accurate to the minute. Between the waves there were gaps and I had been using the gaps to plan and think and map the room and listen to what came through the door and build whatever I could build out of what I had.

The bedframe was next to my head.

I registered that. The position, the distance, and the material.

The frame was metal pipe construction, an old one. The kind that had been in the room long enough to have rust at the joints. The corner of it was approximately eight inches from my left temple where I was lying.

I looked at it steadily.

I thought about the wave that had just passed and the one that was coming.

Each one was longer. Each one left less behind it to work with. At some point the gap between what the body could manage and what the compound demanded was going to close entirely and I was going to lose the ability to ride it.

I needed a different strategy to stop the damn pain.

After a while, the next wave came.

It was worse than the last one by more than I had prepared for. It came up through my lower back first, which was new, and then through the spine and into the neck and then into the skull and something in me that had been held extremely still and extremely controlled for days came loose.

I moved before I decided to move.

The bedframe was right there and without thinking, my head connected with the corner of it and the sound it made was loud in the small room.

The pain that arrived was immediate and enormous and completely different in character from the chemical pain. It was real and physical and present in a way that the bone pain somehow wasn’t and for about three seconds the two of them competed and then the new pain won. The new pain was way better than the chemical pain.

The chemical pain went quiet underneath it.

The room tilted and went white in my eyes..

“No!” Kyra’s voice came through suddenly much clearer than it had been in days. The shock of what I had done had cut through whatever was suppressing her and she was more present than she had been since the street outside Orren’s building.

“Rowena! Stay awake. You stay awake right now. Don’t you dare leave me. Don’t you dare!”

I tried to answer her but I couldn’t find the words.

The white at the edges moved inward.

“ROWENA!”

The door burst open at that moment. I figured the sound of the banging had alerted the guards stationed outside my room.

My blood trickled over my face as I collapsed helplessly and passed out cold with Kyra’s voice as the last thing I heard.