Unbind me

chapter 4

But there's nothing. Just silence, heavy and oppressive, broken only by the distant sound of the storm outside.

I let out a slow, shaky breath, leaning my head back against the wall. The rain and snow continue their relentless battle outside, and I feel the cold seep deeper into my bones. Two weeks. Two weeks since Adam arrived, and everything still feels the same. Maybe that's the cruelest part of this place—the way it swallows change, erases it, makes it meaningless. No matter what happens, no matter who comes or goes, the walls stay the same, the routine stays the same, the emptiness stays the same.

I close my eyes again, letting the sound of the storm lull me into a fragile kind of peace. It's all I have right now. The storm, the cold, the silence. It's not much, but it's enough to keep me breathing, to keep me waiting for whatever comes next.

· · ────── · ❈ · ────── · ·

I woke up to the sound of a crash. A heavy thud followed by the sharp, unmistakable bark of orders. For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was still dreaming. The walls of this place play tricks on you, the echo bouncing like ghostly whispers between the endless concrete corridors. But this wasn't a trick. It was coming from Juliette's cell.

Another crash. Then shouting. My body stiffened against the cold floor, the thin blanket doing nothing to protect me from the chill that had seeped into my skin. My heart stuttered into an unsteady rhythm as I strained to hear.

"GET UP," a voice bellowed, deep and brimming with venom. I recognized the tone instantly—it was the same one they'd used when they first threw me into this cage. The voice of power. Of control.

I didn't need to see to know what was happening in there. I could hear it in Juliette's sharp gasps, in the muffled sounds of someone hitting the ground, the scrape of boots against the floor. My throat tightened as a small cry escaped her—a sound she quickly bit back, but not fast enough.

They always came with their guns and their steel-toed boots, their barked commands that left you no room to breathe. No room to resist. The walls vibrated with their brutality.

I stayed frozen, curled into myself as if I could make myself invisible, even though I knew they weren't here for me. Not yet.

Yet.

That word clung to me, sticky and suffocating. Because what if they were? What if Juliette's cell was just the warm-up? What if they'd decided tonight was my turn?

I swallowed hard and tried to slow my breathing. Counted the seconds between each scream, each thud, each bark of a voice that didn't belong to anyone human.

I thought about the nightmares.

When Juliette first arrived, the whispers had started almost immediately. The other prisoners talked about her in hushed voices, their words barely audible over the static that seemed to fill this place. "Beware of the nightmares," someone had murmured once, the words sticking to me like frostbite.

They'd been right. I heard her scream almost every night for weeks. Wails that echoed into my own restless sleep, twisting into my dreams and dragging me down into her terror. I didn't know what caused it. I didn't want to know. But I was sure the people running this place had something to do with it.

I remembered the diary—the doctor's scrawled notes that I'd stolen and hidden beneath my mattress. Pages filled with cryptic references to experiments, subjects, control. Things I didn't understand but that left me nauseated with the weight of their implications.

Juliette's screams tonight weren't like the nightmares, though. These were louder. Rawer. Real.

And as much as I wanted to block it out, to shove my fingers in my ears and pretend I didn't exist, I couldn't stop listening.