The sound of my own breathing was a wet, rattling choke inside the dark. Every single inhalation felt like swallowing liquid glass; every exhalation left a thick spray of dark metallic copper on my lips. I lay perfectly flat on my back on a rusted steel examination table, the cold metal biting through my torn shirt. I anchored my hands to the flaking frame, gripping the edges until my fingers went numb, trying to ground myself against the agonizing waves pulsing through my skull.
My mind was a chaotic blur of pain and panic, but the memory of how I ended up here remained brutally clear. Asher Reed's first strike hadn't been a bullet. It had been his fist. A massive, unforgiving force that had collided with my face with the raw momentum of a freight train. The impact had literally shattered my jawbone into jagged fragments. Right now, those loose pieces of bone scraped agonizingly against the sensitive lining of my throat every single time I tried to move.
