Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Interrogated

FARAH

“Serapha,” the man says again, rolling the name across his tongue like he’s savoring something long denied him, circling me slowly the way a predator circles something already caught.

“You don’t remember me, do you? No matter. You will.”

“I don’t know you,” I say, forcing as much steel into my voice as I can manage despite the fear coiling tight in my stomach.

“I don’t know who Serapha is to you, or what she did to deserve whatever this is, but I promise you, I’m not her.”

Something flickers across his face—amusement, maybe, or something colder than that—before he simply gestures to the men flanking him, and I’m dragged backward before I can say anything else.

My protests are swallowed by the rough hands hauling me away from that opulent room and down into something far less civilized.

The room they bring me to is cold in a way that settles immediately into my bones, stone walls slick with damp, a single flickering light overhead casting everything in harsh, unforgiving shadow.

They chain my wrists above my head, the metal biting instantly into skin already raw from the rope, and I think, absurdly, that Caspian’s prison—cold stone and silver chains and all—suddenly feels like a luxury compared to whatever this place actually is.

The questions start almost immediately, and they come from a different man now, someone with a flat, bored voice that somehow makes the whole thing more terrifying than if he’d shown any real emotion at all.

“Where is the sword,” he asks, over and over, in different shapes and different angles, like repetition alone might eventually wring an answer out of me that doesn’t exist.

“What do you remember of the curse? Tell us what Caspian has told you.”

“I don’t know anything,” I say, again and again, until the words lose all shape and meaning in my own mouth.

“I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what Serapha did or who she was or why everyone seems to hate her so much.”

Just my luck, some exhausted, hysterical part of me thinks, to have inherited the rage of a woman who apparently spent her entire existence making enemies out of everyone she ever met.

They don’t believe me.

Of course they don’t believe me, no one ever has, not since the moment I stumbled into Caspian’s territory and this entire nightmare began.

And when words fail to produce the answers they want, they move on to something far worse.

The cloth comes next, wet and suffocating, pressed tight over my face while water pours down in a steady, relentless stream, and I can’t breathe, can’t scream, can’t do anything except drown in slow, deliberate increments while my body convulses against restraints that refuse to give even an inch.

They pull the cloth away just before unconsciousness claims me, giving me exactly enough air to understand how close I came to dying, before the questions start again, patient and merciless, as though they have all the time in the world to break me into something useful.

I lose track of the days after that.

There’s no window here, no way to measure the passage of time beyond the rotation of faces that come to question me and the gradual, terrifying realization that my body is beginning to give out beneath the weight of everything being done to it.

I think, somewhere in the haze of pain and exhaustion, that I might actually die here—alone, forgotten, a prisoner of a conspiracy I never asked to be part of, with no one coming to save me because no one even knows where I am.

The dreams come more often now, slipping in through the cracks of consciousness whenever exhaustion finally drags me under between sessions.

They’re sharper than they’ve ever been before, more vivid, more real, and in one of them I find myself standing in a sunlit room I don’t recognize.

Caspian’s face is in front of me—younger, somehow, softer around the eyes—looking at me with an expression of such open, unguarded adoration that it steals the breath straight out of my chest.

“You’re everything I didn’t know I was missing,” he says, in a voice stripped of all the coldness I’ve come to associate with him.

And I reach for him in the dream, desperate to hold onto something that feels, impossibly, like safety.

I wake gasping, disoriented, the cold stone floor beneath me a cruel contrast to the warmth of the dream still clinging to my skin.

It felt real.

Impossibly, achingly real, in a way that leaves me aching for something I’m not even certain actually existed, grief for a version of him I’ve never actually met twisting painfully alongside the grief I already carry for the version I have.

The next session comes too soon, my body too weak now to fight back with anything beyond the barest flicker of resistance.

And somewhere in the middle of it, drifting in and out of consciousness as the water rushes over my face again, I think I hear something—a voice, low and furious, cutting through the haze like a blade.

It’s not real, I tell myself, as darkness creeps in at the edges of my vision.

Another dream.

Another cruel trick my exhausted, desperate mind is playing on me, conjuring hope out of nothing because the alternative is simply giving up entirely.

But the last coherent thought that flits across my addled, fading mind, right before everything finally goes dark, is that he’s come for me.