Alena woke to the sound of breathing that wasn’t her own.
It came in layers—soft exhales, the shuffle of fabric, the faint squeak of rubber against polished floors. For a long moment, she didn’t open her eyes. She lay there, suspended between sleep and something heavier, her body unwilling to move, her mind slow to catch up.
She felt… wrong.
Not in pain—not like before. The agony that had torn her apart in the forest was gone, replaced by a strange, hollow soreness, like her body remembered what had happened even if it had stopped screaming about it.
But there was something else.
A sharpness.
Her senses stretched outward before she even meant them to. She could hear the quiet murmur of voices beyond a wall. The rhythmic beep of machines. The faint hum of electricity. The smell—
Anti
