She screams. The sound fills the room, shakes her bones, and echoes for years.

DAY 13

The skin on her cheeks is tight from dried tears. The blood that poured from her nose is cracking. Her throat is sore, and her body feels like she was locked in a box and thrown from the top of a mountain. She can still hear her own wailing, though the room has been silent for hours. Her eyelids close slowly, as if it’s taking all the strength in the world to accomplish a single blink.

Lynell is sitting with her back against the wall, knees to her chest, body swaying. Her butt hurts from not moving for hours but the pain doesn’t feel like it belongs to her.

Every pain in her body—the broken fingers, cuts by her eye and on her lip, a broken nose and a fresh bruise on her cheekbone—every ache from running and hiding and fighting and falling and crying, every hurt is nothing, is even relief from the agonizing, shattering, tormenting pain that is waging a war in her chest.

Daniel Carter. The only man she’s ever loved. The only man she thinks has ever loved her. The man who chases after what he wants, stands tall for what he believes in, loves fiercely, and forgives freely.

Lynell stares, unseeing, in the room she was deposited in hours earlier. Or minutes, she doesn’t really know. Maybe days.

How long has Daniel been gone? Because he is.

Gone.

Must be. That last gunshot found its mark in his back. Guards were filling the room. Eric said so himself. He’s dead.

And Anna? She’s just a kid. There’s no way she escaped alone.

The thought makes Lynell drop her face to her knees.

Lynell, though still alive, is dead, too. Locked in the Elysian basement with no windows and only one heavily guarded door. Lynell only has two days left to live and decide whether or not to give Eric the letter. There’s no reason to hold onto it. There’s no reason to give it to him. There’s no reason for anything anymore.

Daniel would disagree. He’d say there’s always a reason to choose good. To do the right thing. But the right thing no longer seems like a clear path. It’s been buried underneath all the pain and misery. She couldn’t find the next step if she tried.

The air in the room is warm, but Lynell feels cold. As if death was standing in the doorway, just biding his time to claim her, too. Lynell blinks and forces her mouth to close. She reaches up and wipes her hand across her face. It comes away with dried blood speckling her fingertips.

She should stand. Stretch her legs. Maybe relieve her bladder in the bucket still nailed to the floor.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she closes her eyes again. Falling asleep is the sweetest escape ever gifted to her.