Page 32 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
Turn.
“We need someone higher up.”
My voice comes out even. Flat. Like nothing in the room has shifted.
Like I didn’t just cross something. Like I didn’t just take someone's life. Because whatever that was, it didn’t matter enough to stop me.
eight
Liana
Consciousness returns in uneven pulls, dragging me upward through something heavy, my body slow to follow, like it hasn’t decided whether it wants to wake at all.
At first there’s no shape to anything. Just a distant awareness that I exist again, suspended somewhere between nothing and something, without any sense of where I am or how I got here.
Then the world begins to settle around me.
Cold presses into my back.
Not soft, not shifting, hard enough that it feels like it’s been there for a long time, seeping through my skin, anchoring me in place before I understand what it is.
My head aches in a slow, heavy pulse, something deep behind my eyes that makes everything feel slightly out of sync. When I swallow, it takes effort, my throat dry, the movement dragging behind the thought that tells it to happen.
I stay still.
Not because I choose to.
Because moving doesn’t feel fully available to me yet, like my body is there but not entirely mine.
My fingers twitch.
The movement is small, weak, dragging against something that doesn’t give, and the second I feel it, something in me sharpens without warning.
I try to push up. My arms don’t follow.
There’s resistance. Immediate. Solid.
My breath catches as the fog fractures and my eyes open.
The light is too bright, too direct, forcing me to squint as the room resolves around me in fragments that don’t belong together. A ceiling I don’t recognize. Flat, pale, bare. A faint electrical hum that presses into the ache in my skull.
I turn my head too quickly and the room tilts, the movement sending a wave of dizziness through me that makes my stomach twist.
Concrete.
Bare walls.
Nothing familiar.
My wrists pull before I can stop them, instinct taking over, the restraints biting into my skin as they hold firm no matter how much force I put into it.
My heart is already racing.
Too fast.
Too loud.
The memory lands at the same time.
