My eyes fluttered open slowly, staring vacantly into the dark.
Immediately, an unbearable wave of agony washed over every nerve ending in my body.
Several parts of my flesh had gone mercifully numb, and I had actually found myself feeling grateful for it—grateful that entire patches of skin and bone no longer responded because the nerve pathways had simply burned out under the sheer volume of trauma Romero kept inflicting on me.
The rest of me, though, still felt everything. Every torn, flayed, and blistered inch throbbed in brutal sync with my racing pulse.
How many days had it been?
I didn't know anymore.
Trapped down here in this windowless, foul-smelling concrete crypt, my sense of time had dissolved entirely. Minutes stretched until they felt like hours, and every pause between Romero's visits felt like a lifetime of suffocating dread.
It felt like an eternity already.
Every single second, I caught myself wishing it would all just stop.
