The guards looked at each other uncertainly, their previous confidence shaken for the first time since this nightmare had begun. Then the music increased to an even more punishing volume, and the torture continued with renewed intensity.
But Liora stood her ground, refusing to collapse again. And she started planning her investigation, her mind working despite the exhaustion to figure out how she would uncover the truth.
Forty-six hours and fifty-seven minutes to go.
By the thirty-fifth hour, Liora had stopped feeling human.
Her body had moved past exhaustion into something else entirely, a strange, floating sensation where pain and discomfort felt distant and detached, as if they were happening to someone else entirely, some other person trapped in this golden cage. Her thoughts fragmented and reassembled themselves in patterns that didn't quite make sense, connections forming and dissolving like smoke, logic becoming increasingly elusive. Time became elastic and unreliable, stretching and compressing unpredictably so that minutes felt like hours and hours passed in what seemed like moments.
She'd thrown up twice during the endless torment. Once, from the nausea that came with extreme sleep deprivation, her body was rebelling against the unnatural state she was forcing it to maintain. And once when Kira had shown her close-up photographs of the children's bodies, their small faces frozen in expressions of terror and confusion that would haunt Liora for whatever remained of her life. The guards had just hosed down the cage floor with cold water and continued with their assignment as if nothing significant had happened, as if her suffering was merely part of their routine duties.
The hallucinations were getting progressively worse with each passing hour. Liora could see Aria Nightfang standing in the corner of her cage now, watching her with those dead eyes that somehow still held accusation and judgment. She knew it wasn't real, her rational mind still understood that much, but the apparition looked so solid, so three-dimensional and present, that Liora found herself talking to it as if it could hear and respond.
"I didn't kill you," she whispered for what felt like the hundredth time, her voice hoarse from screaming and crying. "I promise I didn't."
Ghost-Aria just stared with those unblinking dead eyes, offering neither forgiveness nor condemnation, simply existing as a manifestation of Liora's deteriorating mental state.
"She's losing it," she heard Darius say, his voice seeming to echo from somewhere far away even though he was standing just outside the cage. "Talking to herself now."
"Good," Kira replied with satisfaction evident in her tone. "Alpha wants her broken completely."
Not broken, Liora thought stubbornly, even as her vision swam and doubled. Just... bent. Badly bent but not quite snapped.
She'd spent the last ten hours trying desperately to reconstruct that night, the night of the attack that had destroyed so many lives. The gala had been in celebration of her father's birthday, she remembered that much clearly. She remembered wearing a champagne-colored dress that had cost more than most people earned in a year. She remembered dancing with Lord Pemberton, who had sweaty hands that left damp marks on her dress and bad breath that made her want to turn her face away. Remembered her head starting to hurt around 9 PM, a throbbing pain behind her eyes that had made the lights seem too bright.
Then... nothing clear. Just fragments that might be memories or might be dreams or might be something her exhausted brain was creating to fill the gaps. Her room. Her bed. Darkness pressed down on her consciousness.
But what if those weren't real memories at all? What if someone had drugged her that night too, just as they'd drugged her at that final dinner? What if they'd taken her somewhere, done something to her, implanted false memories or stolen real ones, and then returned her to the palace with her mind altered in ways she couldn't detect?
Is that even possible? Liora's exhausted mind couldn't quite grasp whether she was being rational or sliding into paranoia, whether these thoughts were logical deductions or symptoms of her deteriorating mental state.
"Princess," a new voice said, cutting through her spiraling thoughts.
Liora's head snapped up, too fast, making the entire room spin sickeningly around her. She blinked hard several times, trying to force her vision to focus and stabilize.
Veyra, the Beta, stood outside her cage looking like she'd just stepped out of a boardroom rather than a torture chamber. She looked immaculate in a charcoal gray pantsuit that probably cost a fortune, her silver-streaked hair pulled back in a perfect chignon that didn't have a single strand out of place. She carried a tablet and wore an expression of clinical interest, like a scientist observing a particularly fascinating laboratory specimen.