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“Freeloader.”

“I did not choose to hitchhike in your brain, I’ll have you know.”

“Right. You’re just a manifestation of my guilt and stress.”

Ciro blinks twice, his head bobbing in a slow nod before leaning toward me and whispering, “Your self-awareness is showing.”

More like anything to ignore what’s been eating at me since Circe came to see me two nights ago. All I can think of is eating?—

I flop back on the thin mattress, shaking the images and sensations of her from my head. Only problem is that all I have left when I’m not thinking about that hunger, is actual hunger. And the swimming delirium that’s settling in slowly without food. At least I have water.

I suppose they’re either planning to starve me out, or they just forgot about me and I’ll die down in the darkness of a crazy, secret mafia woman’s dungeon. Oh, the life I’ve lived.

So I try to shut off, seesawing back and forth between the misery of wakefulness and the misery of haunted sleep. Otherwise, I pace my cell, try to stay moving, keep my claustrophobia from making me freak.

Apparently, I don’t like being penned in. Who does?

Another day passes.

Or night. Can’t tell anymore.

Dreams bleed into my reality, blurring into memories and fantasies I can’t differentiate from truth. I supposed that’s the point. To drive me to the breaking point.

It almost works.

Until I remember a snippet of training, paired with what might be a real memory.

I’m sitting in a garden, surrounded by flowers, plants. Nearby, there’s a fountain, just outside a gazebo, where a young girl is playing with her dolls. Her mother sits drinking tea at a table with a guy who looks more bodyguard than partner.

But I’m barely affected by all of them. At the same time, I’m acutely aware of all of it. Everything around me. It echoes of something deeper, hours and days spent studying martial arts, meditation. I can almost see a man’s face, putting me through trial after trial on a mountain somewhere.

Interesting.

“It’s the garden at the house,” Ciro mutters in the back of my head. Our house, apparently. I don’t let my mind grasp at that thought though. It’s too easy to try, and I’ve tried too many times. It always slips away, leaving me vacant. Confused.

Instead, I follow the track of that sensation, sitting cross-legged in the garden.

Breathing slowly, deeply, I let my eyes droop, falling into the buzzing hum of mental stasis. Yes. This is familiar…

Time loses meaning. Hunger too. Distantly, I see fragments of my past as I drift in the ether.

A compound nestled in an arid desert, near the mountains. I meditated there too. Locked in a cell. I see myself sitting there, looking back at me through the eyes of a black mask. Marked with a red fingerprint.

Mocro. I was one of the Hand.

The realization doesn’t touch me in my reverie, it simply tucks itself away into a drawer with other things I am certain are real. These images fade, others take their place.

More time passes.

By the time I hear the cell door opening, hours, days, maybe weeks later, nothing can touch me. Except for the sharp pang in my gut when the guards lift me off the ground. I’m stiff. Weak.

But I’m stone-faced, unafraid.

Let them do their worst. I’m ready.

What I’m not ready for, is the light from the setting sun clipping through the windows upstairs. It’s dim by any other standard, but to my light-starved eyes it’s blinding.

I’m settled into a chair in a room, elegantly furnished. None of it matters.