Page 83 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
It dims, sometimes—sliding down into a sickly gray that blurs the edges of the cell and makes it harder to tell where the walls end and the shadows begin—but it never leaves me alone with the dark. There is always a hum under everything, a low mechanical vibration that lives in the bones more than the ears, that keeps time when nothing else does, that reminds you—quietly, patiently—that you are still here and it isn’t done with you yet.
I wake before the lights brighten.
Not because I’m rested.
Because the air changes a fraction of a second before the cycle flips—pressure shifting in the vents, the faint metallic click of relays resetting somewhere behind the walls—and my body has learned that moment the way prey learns the sound of a predator’s footstep.
I sit up on the stone slab that passes for a bed, bare feet touching the cold floor, shoulders stiff, jaw aching from where I clenched it through another half-sleep full of broken corridors and glass and the shape of her face vanishing into white light.
The cell smells faintly of disinfectant layered over mold, over old sweat, over something mineral and stale that never quite goes away no matter how often they hose the place down. The vent above my head clicks once, softly. Again. Again.
I count without meaning to.
By the time the door slot grinds open, my breathing is already slow and steady, my hands folded loose in my lap like I’m waiting for a meeting instead of a meal.
Gray paste in a shallow metal tray.
A dented cup of lukewarm water.
The guard doesn’t look at me. He never does.
“Eat,” he mutters, like it’s an insult.
I lift the tray, balance it on my knees, and eat methodically, scraping the sides clean with the edge of the spoon, because I learned in the first year that hunger stacks, and you don’t get points for dignity in a place like this.
Down the corridor, someone starts yelling.
Not screaming. Not yet.
Just shouting words that don’t make sense anymore, voice ragged and raw like a throat that’s been sanded down to nothing.
The guard pauses, listening.
“Idiot,” he mutters. “It’s not even his day.”
He slides the slot shut.
The shouting continues for another thirty seconds, then cuts off abruptly.
I keep eating.
They come for me two hours later.
Different guards today. New faces. Same eyes.
Cuffs on my wrists, mag-locks humming as they seal. Shackles around my ankles. A hand at my elbow, not rough, not gentle—just precise.
“On your feet,” one of them says.
I stand.
We walk.
The corridor smells sharper this time, like they’ve just run sterilization through it. My bare soles make soft, damp sounds on the floor. Somewhere behind one of the doors, something thuds against metal, over and over, slow and heavy, like a body testing the limits of a wall.
“You hear that?” the guard on my left says conversationally.
“No,” I reply.
