CHAPTER 85
CALLIE
THE WEIGHT BEFORE BREAKING
I knew something was different before anything actually changed. It wasn’t dramatic. No alarms. No shouting. No sudden shift in guards or doors slamming open. It was quieter than that, subtler. The kind of difference you only noticed if you’d been listening long enough to the silence to recognize when it breathed differently.
I’d been counting time by my own pulse for a while now. Not minutes. Not hours. Just heartbeats stacked on top of each other, one after the other, until they blurred together. The room I was kept in didn’t change. The light stayed dim and artificial. The walls stayed cold. Alessandro was very good at consistency. He understood erosion better than violence. You didn’t have to break someone outright if you could wear them
