The cold was the first thing I registered.
Not the pain—there was plenty of that—but the cold. It seeped into my bones, sharpened by the chains cinched tight around my wrists and ankles, metal biting into torn skin every time I so much as breathed wrong. I was half-naked, stripped down to whatever made me easiest to hurt, shivering in a room that felt too big and too small all at once.
They hadn't bothered to restrain me first.
That part came after.
Cuts burned along my ribs. Bruises throbbed deep and purple under my skin. Someone had taken their time before deciding I was done moving on my own.
I lifted my head an inch.
The room swam into focus—wide concrete walls, stained dark in places where blood hadn't been scrubbed clean. Tables lined with tools I didn't recognize. Hooks. Gears. Devices built with one purpose and refined through repetition. Some of them were still wet.
The air smelled like iron and old smoke.
My stomach twisted.
Lila.
