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His scent teases phantom memories – earth after rainfall, woodsmoke, that distinctive dark undertone that made him uniquelyhim.

I chase the memory, trying to recapture the comfort it once provided, but exhaustion and starvation make concentration impossible.

The room tilts around me as consciousness begins to fade, my body finally surrendering to the systematic breakdown they've engineered through deprivation and stress.

My last coherent thought before darkness claims me is a prayer to whatever twisted deity might watch over creatures like us:

Let him survive. Pray he remembers. Let him…still be mine.

Then nothing but blessed silence as consciousness slips away, carrying me into darkness where memories can't follow.

TWO

THE BEAST BENEATH THE ASYLUM

~RIOT~

~I Don’t Hate You~

SIENNA SPIRO

Pain greets me like an old friend, a familiar agony pulsing through every muscle and joint as I claw my way back to consciousness.

Eight hours of combat still lingers in torn flesh and fractured bones that haven't fully mended despite enhanced healing.

Another day in paradise.

The concrete cell feels colder than usual against my back, its surface unforgiving as the masters who placed me here. My laughter echoes hollow against walls that have witnessed six years of systematic destruction—of my body, my mind, my humanity.

Six years in Level Minus Zero, the subterranean hell they created for monsters too valuable to terminate but too dangerous to maintain in standard containment. The fighting pits where alphas with government training prove theirevolutionary superiority through blood sport and controlled savagery.

Where I have become the nightmare they always wanted.

My fingers trace the newest additions to my collection of wounds—three broken ribs already knitting themselves back together, a gash across my abdomen where some desperate contender tried using a sharpened spoon, bruises layered upon bruises in a tapestry of violet and sickly yellow that maps my survival.

The pain means nothing anymore.

Just data points in an endless experiment.

I tilt my head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling stained with water damage and mold they never bother to address. Sometimes I wonder why my heart continues its stubborn rhythm when surrender would be so much simpler.

Why I keep fighting when death would offer the only true escape from this existence.

But I know the answer, even if I rarely allow myself to acknowledge it.

Her.

The memory I keep locked away in the deepest corner of my consciousness, only retrieving it in moments of true desperation when pain threatens to consume what remains of my soul.

An omega with impossible hair—magenta ombré that transitions to the perfect dark teal green, the colors as extraordinary as the mind behind those ivory green eyes.

So young when I first saw her, trapped in that gilded cage above the fighting pits, her body pushed into premature heat by chemicals and cruelty while her mind remained razor-sharp.

Jinx Blackwood.

Not simply another omega specimen, but the ultimate mastermind of this godforsaken place. The only one who trulyunderstood the structure of Ravenscroft and the mysterious Parazodiac Nexus that operated from shadows beyond its walls.

While others saw a frightened child, I recognized something dangerous behind those innocent eyes—a calculating intelligence that observed, analyzed, and plotted while the world dismissed her as merely another victim.