••• Victoria’s POV •••
Silence had teeth in this place. It gnawed at the edges of my sanity, scraping away time until I no longer knew how long I’d been here.
Minutes? Hours? Days?
Time passed in the crawl of dripping water and flickering light.
I’d stopped counting the seconds between drops. They no longer calmed me—they agitated me. Time was pressed down like a weight here. Time, in this place, was cruel.
The damp cloth I’d clawed toward my knees lay half-wrapped beneath me now. Useless in its current state. But I couldn’t discard it.
Hope came in scraps, and I clung to mine as if it were the last stitch holding me together.
My wrists throbbed—bloodless, cold, stiff with dried sweat and skin rubbed raw. Rope bit in deeper with every shift, but I had to keep testing
