Darkness. Thick, suffocating, endless.
It clung to her skin, her thoughts, the inside of her chest. Ronnie floated somewhere between pain and panic, her body a pulsing blur of heat and hurt. She couldn’t move. Every breath scraped her lungs like rusted nails, shallow and broken.
Her mind kept spinning, spinning—like a carousel of horror she couldn’t get off.
The smell of blood was iron-sharp and constant. Hers. Always hers. It soaked her shirt, her pants, the floor beneath her. She could feel it drying on her skin in patches, crusted around her ribs, behind her ears, down the backs of her knees.
Her stomach—intact. Untouched. That was by design.
She wanted to scream, but her throat was raw, destroyed from the earlier hours—screaming had done nothing. No one had come. No one had stoppe
