Page 15 of The Sol Crown (Fractured Lights #1)

The voice laughs again somewhere nearby. I can’t tell if it’s the same one or a new one. They all blur together now. A chorus of shadows

The others are gasping, too. Someone is crying, soft sobs in a corner. I think it might be Brynn.

“What do you know?” It’s shouted again, louder. Right in my ear. My hearing distorts. My head throbs with the force of it.

No one answers.

The tension is unbearable. Waiting. Watching.

Then, another sack. More yelling. Another bucket.

By the third, I’m shaking uncontrollably. My spine aches from the shivers. The cold is in my bones. My limbs feel disconnected, like they belong to someone else. But my mind. My mind is still mine. Barely.

The sack is yanked away again. Harsh light stabs at my eyes, but this time, I barely flinch.

A voice booms from somewhere just out of view; it’s cold, impatient.

“What do you know?”

And then—

“Blue. Doorway. Bath.”

Jorren.

His voice is flat. Hollow. Like something has been scraped out of him and never put back.

The words hang in the air like a death sentence.

My breath catches.

He gave them the code.

A soldier yanks him up, and he’s ushered out. Broken. Gone.

It’s the last time we’ll see Jorren Summers. He’ll be escorted home, discharged from the army, and mentally scarred, but at least he will be alive.

If he couldn’t handle this, there’s no way in hell he could survive enemy capture. Who knows what kind of powers Dagan has at his vengeful fingertips.

The soldiers move into the shadows, and I grit my teeth. Jaw aching .

My body spasms from the icy temperature, teeth clacking together without my consent. My toes are numb, and the pins and needles that crawl up my calves make me wish they had lost feeling, too.

The wet uniform clings to me like a second skin. All I want is to peel it off. I’ll be warmer naked.

Around the room, recruits shiver, but nobody dares move another inch.

We wait.

Trembling. Scared. Scarred.

I spot movement across the room. Brynn crawling toward the door. He taps three times, and the moment his hand drops, his entire body collapses. It’s as if that final act drained the last ounce of strength he had. His frame trembles with silent sobs as he’s dragged out of the room.

This torture is meant to strip us bare, mentally and emotionally.

No one knows what demons they’ll be forced to face down here—buried trauma, forgotten fears, long-hidden grief.

It all claws its way to the surface. The only way to survive is to ground yourself and hold fast to something real before the nightmares take over.

But even the strongest of us aren’t immune.

Sometimes, the past still finds a way in.

The cold stabs deeper than any blade, and each breath scrapes down my throat like broken glass. I try to shuffle into a more comfortable position, but rough hands jerk me upright.

“Stand.”

I stumble to my feet. My knees buckle, but someone grabs my arm and yanks me into place. A voice—low, cruelly patient—whispers behind me.

“Face the wall. Arms out. Palms up. On your toes and hold it.”

I obey, blinking through tears, blinking through the sting in my lungs, the chill sinking into my marrow.

I lift my arms. Spread them like wings and lift myself to my toes.

My muscles scream immediately. My arms are heavy, and my calves cramp.

The wet fabric makes my whole body heavier.

I grit my teeth and try to breathe through it.

Time stretches and warps.

People groan in pain around the room, forced into the same position I am.

“Shut up!” The shouts hit my body like a carriage, my already tense muscles burning.

I fight the urge to let my arms drop, to lower my heels.

Don’t move. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

Seconds feel like minutes. Minutes feel like hours.

My muscles begin to tremble. My fingers twitch. My shoulders throb, then burn, then go numb. Pins and needles crawl up my legs. I clench my fists, but the guard snaps, “Palms open.”

I open them again and watch as my tears drip freely off my cheeks onto the floor below.

A small voice in my head says I can’t do this. That I’m not strong enough.

Another voice—sharper, firmer—says I’ve had worse. That they can’t break me.

That one sounds like Carter.

So I keep my arms up. Even when they shake like leaves. Even when my knees lock, my spine knots, and my fingers curl without permission.

The cold keeps seeping in. The silence deafens. And still, I stand.

After what feels like hours, a voice finally mutters, “Sit.” My knees give out before I can obey. I collapse.

Time passes, or doesn’t. I manage to sit up slightly, my chin resting against my chest. Hair hangs wet and heavy. My fingers twitch, stiff and uncooperative.

But then I feel it.

A faint brush across the tops of my fingers. It’s barely there, a tingling sensation where the cold has already started to numb me. At first, I think I imagined it. But then it happens again, feather-light and deliberate, something drags slowly across my knuckles.

Shielded by the curtain of my hair, I risk a glance. Through the strands, I see a finger tracing mine. Slow, looping circles along the top of my hand. Gentle. Reassuring.

The hand is large, easily dwarfing mine. And the way my body responds—the ache, the tremor, the tingling warmth spreading up my arm—tells me it can only be one person. No one else could make me feel this way.

I lift my eyes.

Stone is watching me. Even hunched over in an attempt to conserve heat, he looms above me, his eyes locked on mine through my veil of wet hair.

He stares straight into me. Past the exhaustion. Past the trembling. Past the fear. And in my raw, stripped-down state, it feels like he’s staring into the very heart of me.

I pray he doesn’t see everything.

I pray he doesn’t look too deep and see my secrets.

The room is dark, our hands hidden in the shadows. He keeps tracing slow swirls and shapes across my skin, and I cling to the feeling like it’s the only thing anchoring me. Distracting me from the nightmare around us.

Gradually, I turn my hand over, palm facing up. The motion is tentative, silent. I say a soundless prayer. Please don’t pull away.

He doesn’t.

Instead, his finger shifts, now tracing the lines in my palm with a reverence that steals the breath from my lungs. The shiver that rolls through me has nothing to do with the cold.

I stay completely still. As if trying not to startle a wild creature. One wrong move, one twitch, and the moment could vanish.

Then— bang.

The door slams open.

We jolt, hands snapping apart like we’ve been caught doing something forbidden. The warmth vanishes. The tingling fades, and the cold returns all at once.

I clutch my hands to my chest, and I can still feel the phantom shape of his finger tracing the lines in my palm. It shouldn’t matter—it was nothing. A distraction in the dark. But something about the way he didn’t flinch when I turned my hand over…

I’ve faced death, torture, pain. But that quiet touch? That might be the one thing I’m not trained to handle.

Barnett enters. Cloaks over his arm.

“Well done to the seven of you remaining. Put these on. You may leave. Warm yourselves and eat immediately.”

He exits without pause.

My muscles scream as I roll onto my knees, and I wince at the sharp pull in my back. Every movement feels like agony. I push myself upright, my body protesting the effort like it’s forgotten how to function.

Circulation begins to return to my feet, and it’s not the familiar prickling of pins and needles; it’s ice shards stabbing and slicing beneath my skin. I almost long for the numbness again.

I fumble with the cloak. My arms quiver, uncooperative, like they’re not quite mine. After a long, clumsy battle, I finally manage to wrap it around me.

But the warmth I expect doesn’t come.

I’m too cold. Too soaked. The thick wool only traps the chill against my skin, and my wet clothes cling like a second punishment.

The stairs stretch longer than I remember.

My legs shake, but I force them forward, eyes locked on the distant patch of sky.

Each step drags like it weighs more than the last. I bite down on the inside of my cheek—hard—just to give my body something else to focus on.

Anything but the echo of his voice still shouting in my ear.

That’s always been the worst part of this place.

I’m used to being strong. Capable. Safe in the knowledge that I can protect myself.

But the pit takes that—all of it—and shreds it in a matter of hours. It strips you bare, down to your most fragile parts. What’s left is vulnerability.

There’s no fight left in me. Just tired bones and soaked skin and the quiet ache of being undone. I don’t even have the energy to be angry about it, not yet. That will come later.

At the top of the steps, Sam stands waiting in the ankle-length grass, arms tightly crossed over his chest. He still looks as solid and impenetrable as ever.

His eyes scan me subtly, checking me over for any signs of real damage.

I give him a weak nod—confirmation that I’m fine. Physically. Mentally. Or close enough.

Trent is hunched over, hands braced on his knees, retching. Junie rubs his back, but her eyes are glazed, distant, as though she’s not really seeing anything. Her face is pale and drawn, lips tinged blue.

Deacon, a little green around the edges, runs his hands over his face. But after going through this hell with me a few times before, he seems to be shaking it off quicker than most.

Elijah sits curled in on himself, arms wrapped around his knees, gently rocking. He mutters under his breath something about sinking. He looks the worst off. Sweat glistens on his forehead despite the cold, and his long, dark hair sticks to his clammy skin.

That’s the thing with this test: you never know where your mind will take you. What nightmares it’ll drag to the surface. The mind can be a terrifying place, and it seems Elijah was made to face some horrors of his own .

As Stone passes behind me, I feel a subtle brush of fingertips across the back of my hand hanging at my side. A silent check-in and acknowledgement of what just took place between us. Then he continues toward Trent, crouching beside him.

He’s drenched, roughed up, clothes clinging to him like all of us—but he looks fine. Unaffected by the ordeal we’ve just endured, and that is considerably more unsettling to me than if he were rocking on the ground like Elijah.

Because whatever storm he faced, he didn’t let it touch the surface.