Page 97 of Yours on the Canvas

I manage to drag myself inch by agonising inch across the freezing concrete floor until my back hits the edge of the narrow cot. I pull myself up onto the thin, coarse mattress, burying my face in my trembling hands as tears, hot, bitter, and filled with defeat, mix with the dried blood caked across my cheeks.

They are slowly killing me.

I can feel it ticking away inside my chest like a bomb. Every fight is harder, every recovery window shorter, and the internal damage piling up inside my body is becoming permanent.

They are punishing me for leaving.

For running.

My father and Ray are slowly, methodically bleeding me out behind locked doors, turning me into disposable meat for a betting ring until there is nothing left of the man Silas remembers.

That I remember.

And for the first time since I woke up in this tomb, the crushing weight of despair truly takes root, freezing the blood in my veins.

I’m losing hope.

Three months have bled into an endless, distorted eternity of darkness. Silas is a hacker, a brilliant mind living in a bright world of code and sunlight, but Seattle is a massive, sprawling labyrinth of concrete and shadow. He doesn’t know where this house is. He doesn’t know Peter Sale or these forgotten back alleys. Hidden warehouses.

He doesn’t know that there is no digital footprint.

The thought that I will die down here in the dirt, forgotten and broken, feeling like I let him down when he needed me most, shatters whatever fragments of my soul were still holding together.

I close my eyes, letting the heavy, cold darkness swallow me whole as I wait for the end.

* * *

Hours bleed together in the blackness, marked only by the agonising throb of my ribs and the shallow, rattling whistle of my breath.

Then, something shifts in the quiet upstairs.

Muffled shouts break through the heavy wood of the cellar door, and the thud of heavy boots rains down on me like heavy drops of mud.

My eyelids are too heavy to lift, my mind floating somewhere just beneath the surface of consciousness.

I barely register the sharp, concussive cracks echoing through the floorboards above. Gunshots. They rumble through the concrete, but the sound feels miles away, filtering through a thick, cotton-filled haze. My body is shutting down, dragging me under into a dark, welcoming void where the pain can’t reach me anymore.

I don’t move. I can’t. Even when the noise abruptly stops and a heavy, eerie silence settles over the house, I remain slack against the thin mattress, drifting on the edge of nothingness.

I’m too weak. Even if I wanted to call out, to scream for help, my body won’t let me, my throat is raw and dry, the air too thin, and my voice is trapped beneath the crushing weight of the beating I took tonight.

Is it him? Sol?

The prayer forms frantically in my mind, a fragile, desperate hope clawing its way up from the ashes of my despair. Could it be Silas? Could he have somehow found the needle in this massive, wretched haystack?

I hold my breath, listening with every fibre of my being as more shouting and rapid gunfire echoes through the floorboards above. The noise is intense, violent, and chaotic, shaking dust loose from the low wooden ceiling above my head.

And then, just as suddenly as it started, the gunfire stops.

Silence rushes back into the house. A heavy, eerie silence that feels entirely different from the quiet of my imprisonment.

I hear more heavy footsteps, but then they stop.

Low voices form a faint hum against my ears, but I don’t know now if I’m imagining it or if it’s just the void I’m heading into. My body jolts as I hear one more sharp gunshot echo through the structure, and then silence claims everything again.

It’s the silence after a storm, the quiet of a battlefield where the smoke is still clearing and the dead are left behind.

I lie there, my body fading in the dark. I want to hope, I want to believe that the nightmare is finally over, but the reality of how deeply buried this basement is, how hidden this tomb has been, tells me not to hold my breath.