CHAPTER FOUR : Crown & Claw

The room was a broom cupboard with a mattress thrown in. Ava found it by smell—industrial cleaner failing to cover something older. Sweat. Blood. The particular ammonia of someone else's fear.

She lay down. The sheet was damp. She stared at the ceiling, counting water stains.

Placeholder.

She pressed her palm flat against the wall.

Concrete. Cold. Then—vibration. A low frequency that started in her teeth and traveled down her spine. Not machinery. Voices.

Distorted by distance, by steel, by the particular acoustics of a building that had heard too much.

She pressed harder. The cold bit through her skin. The vibration continued. Someone was screaming, three walls away, and the wall was thin enough to carry it.

She didn't sleep. She listened.

The screams had shapes. Some high, breaking. Some low, stubborn. One sounded like begging. Another like rage.

Then one that sounded like please, do you know who I am, and Ava's stomach turned because she heard Ryan in it. Not his voice—the tone.

The expectation that pain would negotiate. That the world would bend back.

She got up. Followed the wall with her hand until she found the source—a steel door at the end of a corridor she hadn't walked. No handle. A scanner pad, dark.

She stood in front of it. The screaming stopped.

Started again. Closer now, or she was imagining it.

Footsteps behind her.

"You're not sleeping."

Silas. Blood on his cuffs, fresh enough to gleam. He didn't look surprised to find her there.

"The wall," she said. "It vibrates."

"The Pit." He stepped past her, pressed his palm to the scanner. The door clicked, opened a crack. The sound that escaped—wet, rhythmic—was worse than screaming. He closed it. "You don't go in. You don't listen. You don't ask."

"I didn't ask."

"You stood here for ten minutes." He looked at her properly for the first time. "The room’s the other way. Sleep. Or don't. Tomorrow you work either way."

He walked toward the front. She didn't follow.

She found the sink instead. Ran water until it went cold, splashed her face three times. The mirror showed a stranger. Good.

She didn't sleep again. She waited.

Morning came gray through a high window. Ava's eyes burned. Her hands shook from caffeine and exhaustion and the particular clarity of having crossed a line she couldn't name.

Silas didn't look up when she entered. Just jerked his chin toward the table.

A man lay on it. Conscious. Gash from elbow to wrist, deep enough to show yellow. He watched her with flat, mean eyes.

"Stitch it," Silas said.

Ava looked at the needle. The thread. The wound.

"I don't know how."

"Then he'll bleed."

"You making me a test subject now?" The man glared at Silas, not her. "Last time you had a girl in here, she puked on my boots."

Ava picked up the needle. Her hands were steady. She didn't know if that was courage or shock or the cold from the wall still in her bones.

She started.

Too slow. The thread dragged. The man hissed—not at her, at the fire in his arm. She didn't apologize. Didn't stop. Her stitches were crooked, too tight in places, loose in others.

Ugly. Functional.

She tied it off. Cut the thread with scissors that shook slightly in her grip.

Silas inspected the arm. Poked a stitch. The man grunted.

"Clean the table," Silas said.

That was all.

Ava wiped the blood. Her own reflection looked up at her from the wet metal, distorted, unrecognisable. She exhaled. Didn't know she'd been holding her breath since she woke up.

This was the first thing she'd done today that wasn't for Ryan's eyes. Wasn't for her father's approval. Wasn't performance.

Just blood and thread and the fact of her own hands.

End of day. Ava mopped the same floor she'd mopped that morning. The water in the bucket had gone pink, then brown, then something worse.

The steel door opened.

Silas stepped through. Blood on his knuckles. His collar. Not his—she could tell by the way he moved, loose, uninjured. He stopped when he saw her.

"You stayed," he said.

Not a compliment. An observation, like noting weather.

"You said you’d teach me," Ava said.

"Hmmm."

He walked past. Close enough that she smelled copper and something chemical, sharp. His shoulder nearly brushed hers. Didn't.

He headed to the doorway to the Pit:

"Tomorrow the sutures go deeper."

The door closed behind him.

Ava stood in the empty room. The mop handle was rough against her palm. Her back ached. Her hands smelled like antiseptic and someone else's blood.

She didn't smile.

She just kept mopping.