9
Lucien groaned and rolled over, burying his head under his pillow. It wasn’t enough to drown out the insistent door alarm. It would have been easier to ignore if the pattern grew more impatient, but it didn’t. It just kept repeating at intervals of eight seconds or so, frequently enough to allow no respite, but not so frequent that it merged into a single sound.
Lucien lay where he was for several minutes, the pain of the noise balanced against the horror that thinking of moving brought. He’d managed to hold out for several hours the night before, desperately trying to find a plan to escape, but had eventually given in and finished the rest of the bottle.
His sleep had been full of nightmares, some directly related to the coming meeting with the Rulers, others far more bizarre. T
