Page 127 of Brutal Crown

I’ll burn every last one of them down to get her back.

33

LIA

The cold is the first thing I feel.

It’s not the kind that brushes against your skin and fades. It sinks into my bones, waking me up like a needle dragged up my spine. I try to lift my head and open my eyes, but a dull and splitting pain weighs me down.

The air smells… sterile, like a mixture of bleach and something faintly metallic. It doesn’t match the smell of blood and smoke I remember. I inhale again, slower this time, trying to piece the fragments together.

That is when the memory hits me all at once: the hand around my mouth, the cloth soaked in chemical, the panic that clawed up my throat as the world faded away…

My eyes snap open, and I jerk up too fast. Dizziness claws at me, my heart hammering as I scramble against the wall behind me.

The next thing I feel is pain.

It pulses under my skin like a second heartbeat, raw and persistent. My feet throb and the skin of my knees feels split and ragged. My palms sting when I shift against the hard mattress, as if every nerve has been exposed and dipped in salt.

My breath hitches as I take in my surroundings.

The room is small. There’s barely enough space for the steel bed I’m on and the narrow table shoved against the opposite wall, with a hard-backed chair resting beside it. The ceiling is cracked, with off-white plaster peeling around the corners. A single flickering bulb hangs above me, humming with electricity and casting thin, sickly shadows across the gray concrete floor. There are no windows. Just one door—heavy, industrial, and reinforced with iron—sealed with a thick lock.

I press my back to the wall, arms tightening protectively over my stomach as I fight the wave of nausea climbing up from my gut. The instinct to scream is there, raw and animalistic, but I choke it down. I don’t know exactly where I am or if anyone’s even out there.

I try to stand, but my feet scream beneath me the second I apply pressure. I stumble and land right back on the mattress. The metal spring bed creaks under my weight as I rest my back against the wall. Every movement I make hurts.

I’m a wreck. A bruised, burnt, exhausted wreck.

And I’ve been kidnapped by someone who probably wants me dead.

The third thing I feel is panic.

It is slow at first. It comes with each breath I take, tightening the air in my lungs, tightening the band around my ribs.

I don’t need to ask why I’m here or who ordered for my kidnap.

I know it’s the Society.

They couldn’t let me live after what I did. After rejecting Marco in front of everyone.

The thought coils in my gut, tight and sick. I should’ve run when I had the chance, when I was strong enough.

The doorknob turns.

I stiffen, and my heart thunders as the door creaks open.

My stomach turns to ice as I see who my captor is.

Dante Romano.

Of all the monsters I braced for, he’s the one I never expected. Not because he’s incapable. But because I stupidly thought I saw something human in him the other day. A flicker of decency. A moment of truce.

“I should’ve known it was you.” My chuckle comes out in a dry croak.

I was stupid enough to think that he was a different man who didn’t want me dead because we talked the other day.

He walks in slowly, his hands relaxed at his sides, dressed in his usual pristine black suit with every line sharp and every detail calculated. No need for weapons when your whole life is one.