Page 127 of Somno Slave

The bucket finally lifts.

The cloth is torn away.

He coughs once, sharp, brief, like a gunshot. He sucks in another breath. His lips are blue. His face pale.

There’s a pause.

The lead Friar’s hand is in the air. He holds it for a beat and then drops it to his side.

The cloth returns. Water returns. Suffering returns. And he watches with satisfaction, hands clasped behind his back, posture tight.

“Good,” he murmurs, though I’m not sure who he’s talking to. “Let’s see how long he lasts.”

Deogal’s body shakes now, bones rattling under skin as he fights for oxygen. The sound that tears from him is worse than a scream.

It’s the sound of someone trying to live.

I step forward instinctively.

My feet make no sound.

My presence changes nothing.

“Stop,” I choke.

And still, a part of me watches. Counts how long he lasts.

No one hears me.

Brother Jude turns a page. “Blessed are those who endure. Blessed are those who submit.”

Water pours again.

I step forward, heart hammering.

“Stop.” The word scrapes out of me again.

The water pours anyway. His chest heaves beneath the weight of drowning that never quite kills.

I change tactics, squeezing my eyes shut tightly as if I can force the world away. Blood rushes through my head. I gasp for oxygen, but it doesn’t come.

They remove the cloth and return it a breath later.

“Enough!” I shout.

Nothing.

“Again,” he says, and the bucket tips.

Deogal’s feet thrash violently against the floor, the chain clattering sharp and frantic beneath him as his body fights oninstinct alone. Every muscle locks and jerks. His chest strains uselessly, his throat working around panic, around pain.

And for the first time, he looks small. Not the man they warned me about. Not the murderer wrapped in silence.

Just a boy stripped bare of every defence. There is something horribly young in it, in the helplessness of him, in the way fear cracks him open until all that remains is something fragile and human and terrified. It doesn’t look like evil. It looks like innocence dragged to slaughter.

My vision blurs.

I don’t realise I’m crying until the first tear slips free, hot against the cold of my skin. It horrifies me almost as much as the sight itself—that my body would betray me like this, that some part of me is grieving for him, for whatever he was before the world made him into this.