The room smelled like old blood and rusty metal. It was the heavy, suffocating scent of a place where people came to suffer.
Gideon hung from the ceiling by heavy chains. His feet barely touched the floor. His arms were stretched above his head, wrists bound so tightly that his fingers had long gone numb. Every breath pulled pain through his ribs. One eye was swollen shut. The other burned, dry and aching, forced to stay open because sleep was no longer allowed to him.
He didn’t know how long he’d been here.
He had no idea if he'd been there for hours or days.
Time didn’t work the same in Black Tide’s hideouts. There were no windows, no clocks. Only pain and silence, broken occasionally by screams that didn’t always belong to him.
Then, he heard it. The slow, rhythmic thud of boots.
