A week in, and I’d stopped pretending I wanted to leave.That was the part I couldn’t reconcile—the fact that somewhere between the second and seventh day, the fear had dissolved and something else had bloomed in its place. Something warm and terrifying that had nothing to do with captivity and everything to do with the man who’d been peeling back his own armour, layer by quiet layer, every night he came upstairs from the ring.He told me things in the dark. That was when it happened—after, when our bodies were still intertwined and the noise from below had faded to a low hum. His voice would go soft, almost fragile, and the words would come out like he’d been holding them for years.He’d been eighteen when he was pulled into the ring. A kid from a neighbourhood that ate its young. He’d fought because it was the only currency he had—his body, his willingness to bleed. The man who ran the operation, a ghost na
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