LENA
My limbs ached like I'd been flayed open, then stitched back together by shaking hands. Every breath scraped through my ribs like broken glass, and my wrists were rubbed raw beneath the shackles that hung me like meat. Blood—my own—dried in sticky rivulets down my forearms. My toes barely grazed the cold stone floor, muscles trembling from the effort to hold myself up.
The silence in the cell was alive. Not empty. It pressed against my skin, crawled into my ears. No footsteps. No voices. Just the slow, rhythmic drip of water from somewhere I couldn't see, like a ticking clock counting down to something I didn't yet understand.
But inside me, something was different.
There was a heat. Small. Barely-there. But alive. Like a coal hidden deep in the ash, refusing to die. Someone else might have called it hope. But fire burns a little differently. It burns even still when hope is gone.
