جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 54

The fever broke in the gray hours of the morning. I woke up soaked in cold sweat, my clothes clinging to my skin like a second, suffocating layer. The heat that had ravaged my body for two days was gone, leaving behind a hollow, trembling weakness that felt less like healing and more like being hollowed out with a spoon. I tried to roll over. Clink. The chain pulled taut. I froze, the memory of the night rushing back. The clinic. The scalpel. The binding. I looked up. My left hand was still cuffed to the mahogany headboard. My right leg was still shackled to the bedpost. I was spread-eagled across the mattress, a specimen pinned for dissection. My burned hand… the one Killian had flayed open throbbed with a dull, heavy pulse. It was wrapped in clean white gauze, stark against the dark sheets. I lay there, staring at the ceiling. Safe, I had mouthed.

The chain was a cold snake wrapped around my ankle. I sat on the rug at the foot of Killian’s bed, my knees pulled to my chest, staring at the heavy mahogany door. It had been hours since he left me here. Hours of silence. Hours to think. In the silence, the ghosts came back. But they weren’t the ghosts of my mother or the pain in my hand. They were the echoes of my father’s voice, filtered through Killian’s accusations. He is frantic, Killian had said. He is begging. I rested my chin on my knees, a bitter, dry laugh echoing in my mind. Killian Alatorre thought he was a genius. He thought he had broken the code. He thought he was torturing a beloved daughter to destroy a loving father. He was a fool. He was a lethal, terrifying, powerful fool. My father wasn’t screaming because he loved me. He was screaming because I was his insurance policy. I was the contract that kept the other families from eating him alive. If I was gone, the Moretti alliance crumbled. If the alliance cr