ARIA POV
Lena was telling me about her life before, about her mate’s death and how they had abducted her right after. Life hadn’t been easy for her either, and I didn’t know how she could still find the strength to fight. To live.
It was when she was recounting how she loved picking flowers in the countryside that we heard it.
The slow scrape of metal against metal somewhere down the corridor, like something being dragged, or opened, or unlocked, and it cut through the silence in a way that made Lena’s fingers tighten instantly around the bars again, her whole body going rigid like she had just been pulled out of whatever fragile control she had managed to build in the last few minutes.
I didn’t move.
But my body reacted anyway.
My spine straightened a fraction, my shoulders tighteni
