I glanced at Jax and the blonde again, and something inside me cracked, allowing memories to creep inside. As Brock freed my hands, I saw sunlight and white lace curtains. Murky water, dark with the kind of death that bled out my mother. I collapsed toward the floor, and Brock caught me in his arms as if I weighed nothing.

“Take her to the cell,” Lucas said, voice booming off the walls. “I’ll deal with her in a bit.”

Brock and Vinnie herded me out of the room amidst Rafe’s smothered protests. Hysteria rose in my chest, refused to release. I squeezed my eyes shut as they hauled me down the hall, toes dragging the ground.

“C’mon, use your feet,” one of them said, hoisting me up. “Almost there.”

I lifted my lids, and the tunnel spanned before me in a line of hazy crimson. Blood dripped from the pipes like a leaky faucet, forming puddles where the walls met the floor. That liquid death expanded, stalked in a furtive slither. I was going mad. That was the only explanation because logically, I knew the blood wasn’t really there, but the deep red tore through my mind in a cacophony of whispers. I glanced at my forearms and gasped. Sticky red poured from the slashes as if the wounds had never healed.

“Make it stop!” My breath caught in my lungs, and I fought the grip of their fingers. “Get the blood off of me! It’s not real! Not real…not real…not real…”

Lucas’ minions shook me, propelling me forward. A door creaked open, and the haze of red morphed to black as I hurtled to the dirt. I scratched at my wrists, as if I could remove the blood with my fingernails.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Fuck if I know. The bitch is going batshit crazy.”

The light from the hall cast their figures in an otherworldly blur. My eyes burned with too many emotions that boiled, writhed, cut through me. I wanted to cry and sob and scream, but I couldn’t.

I needed to hurt.

As Vinnie attached my leash to the hook in the floor, I dragged my nails down my arms hard, sucked in shallow breaths, and dug deeper.

“I think she was broken long before we got to her.”

“Rafe…” Even saying his name incinerated me.

“Your boyfriend isn’t comin’.”

So much blood.

Pumping from Rafe’s neck in thick spurts.

No! They hadn’t killed him. My mind was only playing tricks on me, editing the continuous loop of knife to flesh slashing through my sense of reality.

Blond hair.

I grasped that piece of truth, because Rafe’s hair was beautifully dark, just like his soul. My mother’s face flickered in my mind, and I jerked my head back and forth, my thoughts overflowing with chaos, with bloody water and a bathtub full of dead mothers and lost hope.

Five in—