EMMALINE
Smell arrives first.
It always does. I wish it were any other sense — sight, sound, anything that might ease me back into consciousness more gently. Instead I get this: body odor and spiced cologne and underneath both of them something darker, something that has no clean name but that I have come to recognize as the particular scent of this place. Of this version of my hell.
I open my eyes slowly. The light coming through the narrow window above me is thin and mean, pressing through the slits in the stone like it too is being rationed. For one merciful moment, I feel nothing. Just the blunt absence of sensation, a numbness that almost passes for peace.
Then it crumbles.
The pain arrives all at once, flooding in from everywhere simultaneously — my wrists, my back, my head, the
