Page 44 of Vega

“Help me!”

No one came, but I screamed anyway.

I screamed for every locked door I had ever stood behind, every adult who had ignored me, every home where nobody cared if a child cried herself sick.

By the time my voice gave out, I was sitting on the floor beside the bed with the chain pooled against my legs, throat raw, and tears running hot down my face.

Then my breathing changed. It came too fast, too shallow, each inhale catching before it could reach the bottom of my lungs. The room seemed to shrink around me. The chain felt heavier against my ankle, colder against my skin, louder every time I moved.

I pressed my free hand to my chest and tried to calm myself down, but panic had already taken over.

It was the room. The locked door. The silence after I had screamed myself hoarse and realized nobody was coming. It was the same loneliness and helplessness I had sworn I escaped the day I turned eighteen and walked out of the system with a trash bag full of clothes. I had spent years building a life where nobody controlled when I ate, where I slept, or whether I could leave. Now, all of that was gone.

Suddenly, I wasn’t twenty-three anymore. I was that little girl again, alone, scared, and unwanted.

Waiting for someone to come help me but knowing no one would.

VEGARRO “VEGA” MORETTI

That night, Prodigy’s bearded face filled my phone screen while I stood in the kitchen taking Sonnet’s food out of the bag.

“How’d the retrieval go?” he asked.

I scoffed with a chuckle. “She put up a hell of a fight.”

His eyebrows lifted. “The nerd?”

“The nerd tried to stab me in the eye with her keys, threw half a bedroom at me, and damn near bruised my ribs.”

Prodigy laughed. “You let a data analyst rough you up?”

“Keep laughin’.”

He ignored my threat, still grinning. “She still wilding?”

“I had to chain her up.”

“Damn.”

“She kept fighting. Screaming too. Lucky the walls are soundproof. That girl has a set of lungs on her. She screamed long enough for her voice to give out.”

As I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, Prodigy studied me through the screen. “And now you’re taking her dinner?”

“She needs to eat.”

“She needs to eat,” he repeated, dragging the words like they had entertained him.

I cut my eyes toward the phone. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That don’t sound like nothing.”

He leaned back, smiling. “You care about this job a little too much.”

“I need her alive to find out what Roman is up to,” I reminded him as I grabbed a napkin and set it on the tray.

“You don’t order take out and get cutlery for everybody you kidnap.”