For the next two days, I made myself visible. Lingered around the Henson Group headquarters like bait dangling from a hook.
Same rags. Same broken posture. At night, I stayed in a dilapidated rental unit nearby, the kind of place where the walls sweated and the pipes groaned like dying animals.
I knew they wouldn't be able to resist.
Sure enough, two nights later, the trap sprung. A group of men stormed the rental, knocked me unconscious, and dragged me into the dark.
...
"Aria, you really shouldn't have come back right now."
Matthew Henson's voice drifted through the fog in my skull.
"I warned you to behave, but you just had to provoke me."
My eyelids cracked open. Sterile white light stabbed into my retinas. The sharp tang of antiseptic flooded my nostrils, mixing with something metallic—old blood, maybe, soaked into the grout between the floor tiles.
I was strapped to a surgical table. Leather bit into my wrists when I tested the restraints.
*Immobile.*
Georgia Pruitt stood nearby, pristine as a porcelain doll and twice as hollow.