Page 111 of Scarred in Silence

And now it’s time to prove it.

* * *

The moment I step inside, the air shifts.

The hallway smells like bleach and rot. Like someone tried to clean up the aftermath but missed a few pieces of soul stuck between the tiles. The buzzing overhead light flickers, casting long shadows against the concrete. Familiar. Suffocating. Mine.

I don’t ask where they are. I already know.

Down the corridor, through the reinforced steel door, past the keypad that only two of us have access to. My boots echo on the floor, a metronome counting down to the end of a life.

Dante’s already inside.

He doesn’t look up when I enter. Just sits across from Silas, one elbow resting on his knee, a knife twirling lazily between his fingers. His face is stone. The kind of calm that only comes before a storm.

Silas… doesn’t look like Silas anymore.

He’s slumped in the steel chair, arms stretched out in the X-restraints bolted to the wall behind him. Swelling obscures his face, his lips are split, and one eye is completely sealed shut. Blood has dried in thick, crimson streaks down his chest. Flies hum around his legs.

“You took your time,” Dante says.

“I had a call to make.”

His knife stops spinning. “Astra?”

“No. Her father.”

That gets his attention. He looks up, one brow arching.

“I scheduled a meeting,” I say. “Next week. He’s coming to see what I’ve done.”

Dante whistles low. “What we’ve done.”

I don’t answer.

Because this—what’s about to happen—it belongs to him.

Silas has been his confidant. He used him for so many things, only to find out he is involved in trafficking.

He stands and approaches Silas. The man flinches, barely, like a dying dog who already knows the blow is coming.

“I gave him morphine four hours ago,” Dante says. “Not for kindness. Just to keep the bastard lucid enough to talk.”

“Did he?”

Dante tilts Silas’s chin up with the edge of the blade. “Some.”

I walk in slow circles around them, my gaze drifting over the walls, the cracks, the stains. This room has heard every kind of scream.

But not Astra’s.

I made sure she stayed far away.

“He brought in a young girl. She was sixteen when he brought her in,” Dante says, without looking at me. “Told her it was just a party. Just one night. She ended up in a cage for three days.”

I stop pacing. My vision goes cold.

Silas coughs, something wet rattling in his chest. “I—I didn’t touch her.”