They didn’t drag me here screaming.
Not with violence, but with a sedated grace—falling asleep in the middle of my own erasure while Raina’s voice murmured something about divine timing and necessary surrenders.
Now, I wake to concrete and the weight of terrible understanding.
The first thing I register is the cold. The kind that lives in bone and marrow, that seeps through skin until it becomes part of your architecture. It hums through the concrete beneath me like an engine gone silent but still running beneath the surface. My fingers twitch against the ground—rough, unfinished cement that scrapes skin raw with the slightest movement. There’s a thin blanket over me, threadbare and stinking of industrial detergent. It doesn’t help.
The second thing is the light. Or rather, the absence of it. There are no windows, no natural illumination—only candles lining the walls in a mockery of sanctuary, their flames dancing like they are laughing at me. The flickering creates shadows that writhe and shift, making the room feel alive in ways that turn my stomach. I must be underground, deep enough that even screaming would be swallowed by earth and stone.
I’ve never been afraid of enclosed spaces—but this is different. This feels like being buried alive with just enough air to prolong the suffering.
I sit up slowly, every joint protesting like I’ve been lying here for days. Maybe I have been. Time moves differently in places designed to unmoor you from reality.
My body catalogs the space with detective instincts that refuse to shut down even here. The mattress beneath me is thin as paper, more suggestion than comfort. There’s a bucket in the corner, bolted to the floor with industrial hardware. A metal tray waits at the bars of my cell—half the circular room sectioned off with steel bars that look hand-forged, medieval in their brutal efficiency. Lukewarm porridge congeals in a plastic bowl beside a cup of water. No utensils, nothing that could be weaponized.
I touch my neck, probing for injection sites or pressure points. Nothing. No soreness, no puncture wounds. But the heaviness in my head—the cotton-wrapped fuzz at the edge of every thought—tells me there was more in that ceremonial tea than valerian root and lemon balm.
There is a door—metal, seamless, thick enough to be airtight—on the other side of the room. Half prison cell, half visitor’s space.
I breathe in through my nose, slow and steady, then hold it. If I were still at the commune, Elias would’ve found me by now. He’s stubborn like that, tenacious. He would’ve torn apart every building, questioned every member, called in tactical support if necessary.
This is different.
I’m not at the compound anymore. I’m somewhere else. Off-grid, buried deep.
Out of reach.
My chest tightens at the thought—not panic, not yet, but the slow edge of dread settling like sediment in still water. If I let it move too fast, if I acknowledge the full scope of my situation, I’ll start screaming and screaming gets you nowhere in a room built to swallow sound and hope in equal measure.
I swing my legs off the mattress, bare feet touching concrete. I count the steps from bed to bars. Six and a half. From bed to wall—three. The food tray comes without warning, always while I sleep. The contents never change: water that tastes of metal, porridge with the consistency of wet cement, occasionally a boiled egg. Enough calories to function, never enough to feel satisfied. It’s psychological warfare dressed as logistics.
You’re a detective, I remind myself. You know how this works. Control the variables.
But that gets harder every hour. Sleep comes in fragments, too brief for dreams or too deep for memory. The silence between meals is deliberate, curated to drive rational minds toward madness. I don’t hear footsteps above, no voices through the walls. Pure isolation.
Then—something changes. A sound. Distant. Echoing through layers of earth and stone.
The door opens and a figure steps inside, while I brace myself for the sermon I know is coming.
He enters without ceremony, without guards or props or the theatrical flourishes I’ve learned to expect from megalomaniacs. Only him—Jonas Vale framed by the doorway like a cutout from a religious fresco, lit from behind by hallway illumination that makes him look more shadow than man.
He doesn’t speak at first, just steps inside like he’s entering a sanctuary. His hands are folded behind his back in a posture that suggests contemplation rather than threat. His feet are bare.
The door shuts behind him with the soft finality of a coffin lid.
I wonder if this is the day I die. If all the psychological preparation has been leading to this moment—the revelation, the conversion, or the termination of a failed experiment.
“Do you feel it?” he finally asks.
His voice is soft, careful, modulated like a therapist’s or a priest’s. A man accustomed to being listened to, obeyed, believed.
I stare back through the bars, lips pressed into a flat line that’s become my default expression. I won’t give him the satisfaction of curiosity or fear or anything resembling engagement with his madness.
Vale smiles faintly and lowers himself to the floor—cross-legged, monk-like—as if this is a therapy session between equals rather than a captor addressing his prisoner.
“You’ve been altered,” he says with the certainty of someone stating scientific fact. “The vessel takes time to open, to soften, to become receptive. But you’re already blooming.”
The vessel suffers for our salvation.
I’m suddenly nauseous.
He doesn’t blink as he says it, doesn’t show any awareness of how insane the words sound. This is his reality now, his truth. The scary part is how completely he believes it.
“Tell me,” I murmur, my voice hoarse from disuse and barely controlled rage, “do you rehearse this crap in a mirror, or does it just pour out of you like diarrhea?”
He tilts his head with the indulgent expression of a parent amused by a child’s tantrum.
“We are all pure beneath the performance,” Vale continues. “Language is just the mask we wear to pretend we’re civilized. But I forgive the fear—I know you don’t yet understand what’s happening to you.”
He lifts a hand as if blessing the space itself.
“It begins in silence. It always does. The stripping away of distraction, the excising of false noise. That is what this place is for—to prepare you for what you’re meant to become.”
My fingernails dig into the skin of my thigh hard enough to draw blood. I want to interrupt, to scream, to lunge at the bars and rattle them until my hands go numb. But I force myself to wait, to watch.
“The first sin was noise,” Vale continues, his voice taking on the cadence of practiced sermon. “The scream of individual ego. The delusion that we are separate from the divine current. But in the spiral, we return to source. The vessel is not merely made to carry—” He pauses for emphasis, savoring the words. “—but to transform.”
His eyes finally flick back to me, and for a moment I see something hungry there, something that makes my skin crawl.
I hold his gaze without flinching. “I think you’ve mistaken isolation psychosis for spiritual awakening. Could happen to anyone with your obvious cognitive limitations.”
He smiles wider at that—not mocking, but almost fond, like I’ve said something that confirms his expectations. When he places his palm flat against the concrete and closes his eyes, I realize this isn’t just theater. He believes in the power of this place, in whatever ritual he’s performing.
“Here, in this manufactured silence, the ego begins to rot,” Vale continues. “Makes way for the truth that’s been waiting beneath.”
And then he turns and leaves without another word.
He returns the next day. I think it’s a day, anyway. The food tray appeared once between then and now, materialized while I dozed. That’s how I count the passage of hours: by meals that taste like penance.
He enters exactly the same way, expression serene as a monk’s. This time he sits without speaking, apparently content to share silence like communion.
“Once,” Vale starts, like he is reciting a fairy tale, “there was a woman who mistook herself for merely a body.”
I exhale hard through my nose, the sound sharp with contempt. Here we go.
“She thought pain belonged only to her. That grief was evidence of failure rather than proof of connection. But pain is the sound of shaping, and grief is a token earned by the soul.”
“Did you steal that from a crystal shop’s Instagram account?” I mutter without turning around.
He doesn’t react to the insult, just continues with the inexorable patience of someone who has all the time in the world. “She believed her daughter was taken from her.”
My spine straightens involuntarily. Every muscle in my body goes rigid.
“But nothing is ever taken,” he continues, his voice soft as velvet over steel. “Only returned. Only reformed into what it was always meant to become.”
I twist around slowly, my eyes narrowing to slits. “What did you just say?”
Vale’s smile is beatific, empty of everything except terrible certainty.
I rise to my feet, my legs shaky with adrenaline and malnutrition. “Say it again.”
But he’s already moving toward the door, his bare feet scuffing on the concrete.
“Say it again!” I demand, but he doesn’t acknowledge the words.
I rush to the bars, gripping them hard. “Vale!”
The door closes with a soft click.
On the third visit, he stands in the center of the room and closes his eyes, breathing like this is meditation, like my suffering is just another form of prayer. I guess it is.
He opens his eyes and speaks without preamble. “It is not punishment. It is providence.”
“Get out,” I whisper, but the words come out broken.
“You still think you’re the detective,” he says with gentle condescension. “But roles are illusions. You are the body that carries what others cannot hold. The unbroken echo of divine purpose.”
I hurl the metal water cup at him with all the strength left in my deteriorating body. It bounces off the bars with a sharp clang, then hits the concrete floor with a hollow thud that seems to reverberate forever.
“Shut the fuck up,” I hiss, my voice raw with fury and desperation. “You want to kill me? Do it. Be done with it. I’m not your sermon or your symbol or your goddamn salvation.”
His expression doesn’t change. He takes a slow, measured breath and smiles with the patience of someone who’s watched this exact breakdown countless times before.
He reaches the door, then pauses with his hand on the frame.
“You are perfect,” Vale says, and his voice carries a note of genuine reverence. “Just like your daughter was.”
Everything inside me goes still, then cold, then burning.
But he’s already leaving. I stumble forward, slam my hand against the bars hard enough to feel bones jar.
I’m in shock. Because there was never a connection between Wren’s disappearance and this cult. I combed every detail, followed every thread, exhausted every lead. The Church of Reclamation didn’t exist six years ago—at least not visibly, not detectably.
No paper trail connecting Vale or his followers to missing children. I would have found it. I would have burned down half the state to find it.
So why does he speak of Wren like he knows her? Not metaphorically, not as a symbol, but with the specific knowledge of someone who was there?
Why bring up a six-year-old girl who vanished from her own backyard on a sunny afternoon?
My knees give out and I sit heavily in the dirt, breathing like I’ve been running for days without stopping.
There’s something here. Something I missed, some fracture in the case. Some connection so carefully hidden that even years of obsessive investigation couldn’t uncover it.
I don’t know how long I sit in the dirt with my knees tucked against my chest, eyes fixed on the metal cup that now sports a permanent dent at the rim.
I’ve interrogated sociopaths who kept trophies of their victims. I’ve held steady hands during autopsies while staring into faces that reminded me too much of people I’d lost.
But this is different.
This is disintegration in real time, the careful structure of everything I believed about my life collapsing into rubble. I know I’m being broken down systematically, deliberately. That’s what this place is designed for—the stripping away of certainty until only raw need remains.
And the terrifying part is that it’s working.
I used to think I would know if something was wrong with my child. I used to believe maternal instinct was more reliable than forensic evidence. I used to think I’d see the danger coming.
The sound of the lock turning slices through my self-recrimination like a bone saw through cartilage.
I freeze, every nerve firing at once. The room seems to hold its breath with me, waiting for whatever fresh horror is about to walk through that door.
My pulse kicks against my ribs like a caged animal. I stand not because I want to, but because my body won’t let me remain passive. Some primitive instinct is screaming warnings I don’t understand yet.
The door opens wider and a figure steps into the candle-lit space.
But it’s not Vale.
My breath catches so hard I almost choke on it.
Recognition hits me, like being struck by lightning while standing in water. Everything I thought I understood about this case, about my life, about the six years of grief and obsession that brought me here—all of it collapses in on itself like a controlled demolition.
My knees weaken, but I don’t fall. Can’t fall.
And the only thing I can barely a whisper is, “You?”
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