She wasn’t dead. She was cold and in pain. Sitting up, she groaned at the wrongness of the feeling in her head. It felt big and heavy, a dull ache dragged across her forehead and into the base of her skull. She’d hit Paul and he’d hit her back, but where was he? She scooted to a sitting position, leaning her head back. She was freezing. Duct tape stretched over her mouth, she supposed, as part of her punishment, since no one could hear her in here, anyway. She felt her internal panic clock ticking faster. The walls pressed in and Rainy dropped her chin to her chest and tried to be somewhere else, but her control was a paper town. The last time she’d been inside a walk-in freezer, she’d seen her mother’s lifeless body. Did he know? Had he been there, too? She tried to think, but the pain in her head was as distracting as the cold.

Paul’s blood was everywhere—her pants, the floor—and she knew that if she looked in a mirror, she would see it on her face. She could smell it. He was nowhere to be seen, though for all she knew he was out there beyond the freezer doors, doing something to Braithe in retaliation for what Rainy had done to his face. She squirmed against her bonds, but it was no use. Conserve your energy, Rainy, think. She could do that; she knew how. She’d spent the torturous hours in solitary, thinking. She hadn’t checked out and she hadn’t pretended to be somewhere else: that had been her time to examine what was happening to her and why. She swayed from side to side, eyes closed, doing her best to keep moving without exerting herself. He knows how your mother died, he knows how Taured used to punish the women at the compound. He might even know that Sara helped you get away. Fuck, she thought, and from deep in her subconscious, she began to remember.