Lord Alexander stepped forward, his aura heavy and oppressive, magnifying the dread that thickened the air.His fingers caressed the cat-o’-nine tails, the leather tassels whispering against one another like serpents, hissing in anticipation.
His lips curled into a cruel smirk.“Shall we indulge in some entertainment with our prisoner?”
“I would not dream of denying you pleasure,” Mathias murmured, a wicked gleam in his eyes.“I want to savor this.”
And then it began anew.
A symphony of suffering orchestrated with a conductor’s precision.
They struck with methodical cruelty, each lash, each blow, calculated—not just to hurt, but to unravel me.
The room became a blur of agony, the walls pulsing, shifting, darkening, until I could no longer tell where I ended and the pain began.
And then, finally, they left.
I hung there, a marionette with its strings cut, my body broken, my breath ragged.
But I was still breathing.
Still alive.
Because surrender was a luxury I could not afford.
Even in the suffocating dark, as despair threatened to devour me whole?—
A single ember of defiance still flickered within me.
Time had become an enemy, stretching each second into an eternity of anguish.The cold stone of the torture chamber leeched the last remnants of warmth from my body, leaving me shivering, brittle, and alone with my torment.
Pain was my constant companion, whispering lies of defeat, coiling around me like a serpent, constricting, suffocating.
And then?—
A sound.
Soft, almost imperceptible.
A rustling, like the wind stirring the dust of forgotten ruins.
My battered heart, beaten into silence by agony, stuttered to life.
Elizabeth.
She seeped into the room like a salve against the raw edges of my spirit.
“Amir?”
Her voice was fragile, a delicate thread weaving through the suffocating air of the chamber.
“Oh, Amir… what have they done?”
Her sobs broke against the walls, the sound carrying her anguish, her despair.She looked at me—eyes wide with horror, with disbelief, with a grief so deep it hollowed the space between us.
“What have they done to you?”she cried again.
I tried to move, every muscle in my body protesting, screaming.
Through the blur of my pain-clouded vision, I saw her—a wraith of hope and desperation, shimmering in the dark.
