Chapter 18: The Breeding Box
The silence was a physical weight.
It pressed against my eardrums and filled my throat with cotton. I sat on the floor by the handleless steel door for hours. I waited for a sound. I waited for a car engine or a bird or the wind. I waited for anything that would prove the world still existed outside these log walls.
But there was nothing.
I was buried alive.
I eventually stood up. My legs were numb. I walked the perimeter of the main room like a tiger in a zoo cage. I touched every inch of the walls. Solid pine. Cold and unyielding. I searched the kitchen drawers. They were locked. I pulled on the handles until my fingers ached but Kaelen had thought of everything. There were no knives. There were no forks. There was nothing sharp enough to dig through woo
