Chapter 101 101
Annabeth's POV:
I don't know how long I sat there. Could have been minutes. Could have been hours. Time didn't mean anything in that white room with no windows and no way to track the passing of anything except my own heartbeat, steady and persistent, a cruel reminder that I was still alive when he wasn't.
At some point I tried to summon my fire.
It was instinct more than thought. I was cold, so cold, shivering on the floor in my thin gray scrubs, and I reached for that heat inside me the way I'd been doing since I first learned what I was.
But nothing happened.
I tried again. Focused harder, pushed deeper, searched for that spark of dragon fire that had always been there, that burning core at the center of my being that made me what I was.
Nothing. Empty. Cold.
They'd taken that too. Whatever they'd injected me with, that cold spreading through my veins, it hadn't just knocked me out. It had turned off everything that made me a dragon. My fire, my bond, my connection to everything that mattered.
I was human now. Just human. Weak and powerless and alone in a white cell with bloody hands and a dead soulmate and nothing, absolutely nothing, left to fight with.
The scream that came out of me then was different from before. Not rage. Something worse. Something broken.
I curled up on the floor and cried.
Cried for Kaelen, for his stupid smile and his golden eyes and the way he looked at me like I was the most precious thing in the entire world. Cried for Marlen and Lucian, who'd lost their brother trying to protect me. Cried for Marcus, who'd trusted Kaelen to keep me safe and now had to live with the knowledge that his daughter was captured and his ally was dead. Cried for my aunt, who would probably never again know anything about the niece she had raised with so much love and sacrifice.
And cried for myself, for the girl I'd been before all this, the one who just wanted to survive and maybe be normal and definitely not fall in love with a dragon shifter who would die for her.
I cried until there was nothing left. Until my eyes were swollen shut and my throat was raw and my whole body ached from the force of the sobs. Until the tears dried up and I was just lying there, empty, hollow, staring at the white ceiling.
And then, somewhere in that emptiness, something shifted.
Not the bond. Not my fire. Something else. Something harder.
He died for you, a voice in my head said. It sounded like my own voice but colder. More focused. He died trying to save you and now you're lying on the floor crying like it matters. Like tears will bring him back. Like grief will change anything.
I sat up slowly. My whole body hurt. My hands were crusted with dried blood, my face was stiff with salt, and I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. But I sat up anyway.
They took him from you. They took everything from you. And now they have you locked in a box like an animal, waiting to do god knows what.
I looked at the door. At the steel walls. At the fluorescent lights that kept buzzing like nothing had happened, like my whole world hadn't ended in a spray of red blood and a hand reaching for me in the dirt.
What are you going to do about it?
I got to my feet. My legs were shaky but they held. I walked to the small window in the door and looked out into a white hallway, empty, stretching in both directions until it curved out of sight.
They thought they'd broken me. They'd taken my mate and my fire and my freedom and they thought that was enough. They thought I'd lie down and wait for whatever came next like a good little prisoner.
They were wrong.
I pressed my bloody palm against the cold glass of the window. Left a red smear there, a mark, proof that I existed, that I was still fighting even if I didn't know how yet.
"I'm going to destroy you," I said quietly. My voice was hoarse, barely a whisper, but I meant every word. "Every single one of you. I'm going to burn this place to the ground and I don't care if I die doing it. I don't care about anything anymore. You took him from me and I am going to make you pay."
The hallway stayed empty. Nobody heard me.
That was fine. They'd hear me eventually.
They'd hear me when I was standing in the ashes of everything they'd built, with their blood on my hands and their screams in my ears. They'd hear me then.
I walked back to the cot and sat down. Wiped my hands on my gray scrubs, leaving rust-colored streaks on the fabric. Took a deep breath. Then another.
I was alone. I was powerless. I was trapped in a white cell underground with no way out and no one coming to save me.
But I was also a dragon. Even if they'd suppressed my fire, even if they'd silenced the bond, the dragon was still in there somewhere. Waiting. And dragons didn't break: dragons burned.
Kaelen had died trying to protect me. The least I could do was make his death mean something.
So I sat on my cot in my white cell with my bloody hands and my broken heart, and I started to plan.