CAPTURED II

CAPTURED II
Ava’s Pov

They used other methods. Words with the edges filed off. Sleep taken in slices. Food measured out like a punishment. Each day or what the room called a day, stretched like elastic. There were techniques: the low hum of fluorescent lights to bias the brain, a chair with straps that folded your muscles into submission, the small tray of food that tasted like cardboard and guilt. Time becomes a thing you can unspool until it stops meaning anything but cycles.

They beat me in rhythms that were boringly practiced. I counted the strikes like a mad tax collector keeping ledger. One. Two. One. Two. In the intervals, I learned to imagine a voice so concrete it anchored me. Leon’s voice. The memory of the night he had told me, breath ragged, lips brushing my ear… that he wanted me fully even if it ruined him. He had said it like a covenant. I repeated it under my breath until the words became a mantra. You are mine. I’ll protect you. I’ll protect you. Those syllables filled the hollow places with armor.

Victor knew the power of words. He used them like a surgeon. “You could tell me where your friends hide,” he said once, leaning over me, eyes bright with something like faith. “Or you could tell me who you’ve put the patches on. Where Nia keeps her skeleton keys. Where Leon keeps his safe.” He tapped his own temple as if the act of tapping could unlock me.

His fingers lingered at my jaw. Up close, he smelled like money and winter. He smiled the smile of a man who thinks he is still a god because he has the power to name what will happen.

“You think he’ll die for you?” Victor whispered once when he’d tired of threats that pretended to be offers. “He saved files, dear. He saved evidence, routes, names. That chest in his office? You should see the neat tie of it. He’ll open it, and he’ll see the math. He’ll make himself more useful to himself than to you. Men like him, they love the idea of a problem solved more than the person who is the problem.”

It is an art, watching someone who has promised to protect you be presented with the architecture of distrust. My heart did the only honest thing it could do: it betrayed a great, wanton surge of fear.

They took things without asking: fingernail clippings stored like trophies, the scent of my coat, a photograph of Leon and me cropped too close. They slept me under the light until sleep forgot what it meant to rest. They starved me enough that my body felt like a ledger of every meal it had ever missed.

And then one night, which might have been any night, a different kind of cruelty found my stomach. Pain lanced deep and hot like someone had set a coal inside me and then asked me to keep it cool. I pressed my hands there and found warmth wetting my fingers.

Not now, I told myself. Not like this.

But the warm wetness spread and the room tilted. The gag scraped against my teeth like a reproach. My knees folded first. It’s the knees that give you away every time; they do the honest work. I grabbed at the sides of the chair because the world needed an anchor and my hands were varnished in fear and something slick that didn’t belong.

Victor stepped closer with that same slow smile. “Isn’t that interesting?” he crooned. “You have… complications.”

Complications. A business word for a life. He said it as if reading off a list. “You’re going to make him choose in a hurry he’ll resent,” he continued, voice appetite-soft. “You’ll push him into a decision he’ll try to dress up like courage. He’ll be so proud of his own violence.”

I laughed then because laughter is a weapon in a room where nothing else is allowed. “You wouldn’t know courage if it sat in your lap and asked for shelter.”

He pretended to be wounded. “Harsh. For someone who looks pregnant. Is that a… surprise? Babies complicate neat narratives.”

I curled my fingers around my abdomen without thinking, like a reflex mapped onto muscle. For a wild second the room filled with voices: Leon’s, Mira’s, Nia’s… distant and bright like beacons. Leon’s voice had the particular shape of my breath: low, stubborn, a thing that could pull a broken machine back into motion. I clung to it until it was all I had.

“Leon,” I whispered into the small dark of my own memory. “I’m here.”

He wasn’t. The echo of him was.

Victor’s hands were suddenly on my wrist, unexpectedly gentle, and the contrast frightened me in a way sharp words never could. “What will he do, love?” he asked. “Will he break the world to brood over you? Or will he sever the inconvenient string and go find the tidy solution?”

He was enjoying the metaphor. He was a man who thought he owned drama.

Days counted like beads passed. They brought me food I forced past my teeth because I knew my body needed it. They unrolled wires of light to keep me awake and then left me to sleep standing. They spoke slowly, isolating me from the map of my people. When I closed my eyes the corridor outside hummed like a hive. My body kept protest, a low-grade rebellion in my bones.

Once, after a particularly clever iteration of sleep deprivation and taunting, they pushed a small screen into my face. A video played. It was Leon, speaking into a camera, face solemn, recording something for reasons I did not know. His voice trembled in parts I recognized…. when he talked about the files and the need to move quickly. He wasn’t addressing me. He was compiling a message, maybe for later. The cruelty was the manufactured intimacy of it. He looked tired and dangerous and very much like a man I would follow into a room full of knives.

“See?” Victor murmured at my side. “He’s being practical. He’s being brave. He’s being wonderful at being him.” He let his fingers trace a line along my cheek and I hated how it made me flinch.

It was the knock that came from nowhere that undid me. A guard rushed in. The face behind the mask was another thing I’d rather not know. “Doctor wants you… now.”

The doctor. Clean hands. Sterile instruments. A man who spoke in clinical kindness. He was patient and soft, the way a thief compliments the surface of the thing he’s about to steal.

They unstrapped me. I walked because they made me. I moved because motion is still choice, however small. In a thin corridor under fluorescent light, the pain came again; sharp, insistent. I felt something change. Not like a cut, a betrayal. The blood whispered cold at my thighs and I knew with an animal certainty that the life I’d been guarding had been hurt.

I made a sound that was half-laugh and half-cry. The doctor’s face slid into a mask of professional concern. Victor’s hand closed at the small of my back when I faltered and caught me. The closeness was a claim. He steadied me as if he were a man who thought himself gentler than the world required.

“You’ll live,” he said, and the sentence wasn’t comfort. It was strategy. “You will be useful. If you live.”

I groped for anything to hold. My mind rewound to Leon’s last promise; soft, lethal. I held it against my ribs like a talisman and tried to breathe steady. Imagine the warmth of his palm. Imagine him whispering I’ll protect you into some dark room that belonged to us. Imagine being wanted fully and not being an instrument but a person who could be broken and still be recognized as such.

My knees gave out halfway down the tiled hall.

Victor’s arms were around me like a cloak. The contact was contempt dressed as care. There are touches that hum with intent; his did. He bore me up like a man carrying a trophy.

I tried to spit at him. The word never found its air. My lips were thick and heavy, like cotton. He smelled of winter and paper and the same arrogance he wore earlier.

“You’re going to be a difficult file,” he said softly.

I made a small sound; maybe it was a prayer and not a scream. The corridor blurred. The doctor barked orders like a conductor. Someone placed something cold and wide against my thigh. Panic flared bright and pre-formed in my chest. My vision tunneled.

Victor’s face hovered over mine, impossibly close. “But we will keep you,” he promised. “For a while. Keep you for as long as you’re useful.”

The last thing I heard before the room dissolved into a hot, hungry dark was a ridiculous and private thought: that in the facelessness of this place I had once again become someone other people decided the terms of. The last image before the blackness took me was Victor’s hands, steady and clinical on my ribs.

When I woke it was not to light but to a questioning cold. The smell of antiseptic. The hum of machinery. A voice said my name like a verdict.

I tried to shift. My body did not obey.

There was a small, loudness: a wetness against the back of my thighs. I pushed up… not enough and the world tilted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Victor was there, waiting. His eyes were a calculation I had failed to pass. He met my gaze with a confidence that made bile lift into my throat.

“You’re bleeding,” he observed, like a footnote.

My breath stopped. For a moment a delicious, stupid clarity: this was not a metaphor. This was not a threat you could neuter with rhetoric. This was anatomy and blood and the fragile whatever that lived inside my body.

I looked at the space between my legs and then at Victor, who held me like someone testing the weight of a secret he had kept too long.

Something warm and wrong spread and the room shrank and I realized it, with a cold that tasted like iron: this was not a bruise I could laugh off. This was not the kind of pain that came with lessons and came out wiser. This was the sound of a life inside me being answered with violence.

The world spun.

Victor’s arms closed and for once his touch was not an insult but an anchor. I slid, hot and slippery, into him. My head hit his chest and something in my belly clenched like a fist.

“Doctor,” I said, because my voice was a broken tool, because I needed knowledge. “Doctor…”

He stroked my hair with a tenderness that did not belong to him. “You need to rest,” he said. “You will rest. We will see to it.”

I thought of Leon’s hand over my stomach in the photograph, of the way he looked at me when he vowed to protect, of the promise that had once been a steady thing and now was a possibility dangling on a fraying rope.

My mind reached for the voice that had been my well. “Leon,” I whispered into Victor’s shirt, because it was the only language that could keep the darkness honest.

The back of my legs were wet and the world became a corridor of numbers and beeps. Somewhere a machine answered with a small, clean beep and then another silence.

I realized with something like horror that I was not only wounded; I was in the place where wounds got catalogued, where speculations about outcomes were traded like currency.

Victor’s face hovered above mine, a map of certainty. His eyes were bright with a triumph that made me want to vomit. “You’ll make him choose,” he murmured, as if that were the nicest thing one could possibly do to a person.

I tried to laugh, but the sound came out broken. “He’s already chosen,” I heard myself say, weakly, a lie because I needed him to be true.

Victor’s hands were steady. “We’ll find out soon.” He bent his head and kissed my forehead once, the smallest of gestures. “Rest now, Ava. Save your strength.”

When he turned, the doctor leaned forward, voice clinical and small. “You’re stable for now,” he said. “But the hemorrhage…” His words blurred. I couldn’t catch them. My head was full of water.

They laid me back like an offering.

And the last thing I saw was Victor’s profile, carved and proud in the sterile light, as if he owned the horizon. He had my photograph tucked into his jacket pocket; proof and threat all in one and he pressed it like a bookmark where he could see it, like someone keeping score.

Leon’s voice, as always, came when I needed it most, not in the room but in the hideaway of my mind; memory is a contraband you never lose. I’ll protect you, he had said. I mouthed it, clung to it, made it a mantra, a rope.

Something inside me clenched and loosened. Pain. Fear. A small, ridiculous hope that he would come.

The room hummed. Beeps threaded the air. My world narrowed to the single stubborn, furious thing I still remembered how to do: breathe.