Inside Cell 404, time didn’t pass; it eroded.
Alessandro Romano sat on the edge of a bolted steel cot, his back against the weeping stone of the Jura mountain. The air was thin, tasting of recycled oxygen and the metallic tang of high-voltage dampening fields. He was a man stripped of his suit, his weapons, and his name, yet the "Wolf of Sicily" remained etched in the hard set of his jaw and the predatory stillness of his hands.
He counted his heartbeats to keep the silence from becoming a sensory deprivation trap. *One thousand four hundred and twelve.* The walls of the cell were lined with lead-mesh to kill any outgoing signal. There were no bars, only a seamless slab of reinforced acrylic that looked out onto a corridor bathed in a sickly, monochromatic yellow. He had been here for se
