Page 17 of Somno Slave

“Fifty-Five years old. Trauma surgeon. Married.” Peter pauses briefly. “They found him opened up on his own operating table.”

My stomach turns sharply.

Peter’s gaze never leaves Deogal.

“Brutally,” he adds.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Deogal doesn’t even look down.

Peter leans back slightly in his chair, studying him.

“The surgical cuts were precise,” he continues. “Not frenzied.” His eyes stay fixed on Deogal. “You wanted him conscious for as much of it as possible.”

My fingers tighten around my pen.

“That tells me something important about you.”

I find myself staring too hard again, tracking his jaw, his throat, the rise of his chest, desperate for something human to break through the stillness.

Nothing comes.

Deogal just sits there beneath the lights, hands resting loosely in his lap, dark curls shadowing his face, looking less like a man being interrogated and more like something waiting for the room to exhaust itself first.

The silence drags on.

Peter turns another page in the file, but the movement feels tighter now. Less controlled. I catch the smallest fracture in his composure before he smooths it away again.

My eyes drop to my notebook.

Blank.

Not a single useful note in over forty minutes.

Heat crawls faintly up my neck. My pen hovers uselessly above the page before I lower it completely.

Without thinking, I reach for the badge clipped against my chest. My thumb presses hard against the plastic edge, grounding myself in the familiar shape of it, the proof that I still know what I’m doing.

But for the first time in my career, I’m looking directly at someone and getting almost nothing back.

No.

Worse than that.

I don’t think Peter is getting what he wants either.

Chapter Six

Deogal

The room empties, and they leave me in their version of silence.

The door seals with a heavy mechanical thud. Footsteps fade. Voices disappear down the corridor one by one until there’s nothing left but fluorescent hum and the stale heat trapped inside the room.

I stay exactly where they put me. The restraints cut deep into my wrists, but I don’t test them. There’s no point. Panic belongs to people who still believe they’re trapped.

My head stays lowered. I listen instead to the tiny catch in her breathing every time someone says my name. The careful inhale afterwards. Pushed back down like she’s trying to keep her own body from embarrassing her.

She’s frightened already, but it hasn’t spread far enough yet.