The first hour wasn't so bad.
Liora had cried herself out, kneeling among the scattered photographs of the dead, clutching Aria's silver bracelet in her shaking hands. The two werewolf guards stood outside her cage, watching her with cold, predatory eyes that never blinked. She'd tried talking to them. Begging. Explaining that she was innocent. They hadn't responded. Hadn't even acknowledged her words. They just... watched.
By the second hour, exhaustion was pulling at her. She'd been unconscious for three days, but whatever drugs they'd used had left her feeling hollowed out and weak. Her body ached. Her head throbbed. All she wanted was to close her eyes and escape into sleep. She'd just started to lean against the silk cushions, her eyelids growing heavy, when....
BANG.
The sound of a fist slamming against the cage bars jolted her awake, her heart racing. One of the guards, a massive man with a shaved head and scars across his face, smiled at her.
"No sleeping, Princess."
"I'm just... I'm tired," Liora whispered, her voice hoarse.
"We don't care," the other guard said. She was a woman, tall and lean with short blonde hair and eyes like chips of amber ice. "Alpha's orders. No sleep."
"For how long?"
"Seventy-two hours," the man said cheerfully. "Three days. After that, if you're still conscious, we move to phase two."
Three days without sleep. Liora's stomach dropped. She'd read about sleep deprivation once, in one of the psychology books from the palace library. It was a form of torture. After forty-eight hours, people started hallucinating. After seventy-two, some people went insane.
"You can't do this," Liora said, trying to sound firm even though her voice shook. "The treaty, my father signed a treaty....."
"The treaty makes you Alpha Thessian's property," the woman interrupted. "Which means he can do whatever he wants with you. And what he wants is for you to suffer."
The man pulled out his phone and tapped the screen. Suddenly, blinding white light flooded the cage from hidden fixtures in the ceiling. Liora threw her hands up, covering her eyes.
"Phase one," he announced. "Constant light. Constant noise. Constant surveillance. Every time you close your eyes, we wake you up. Every time you start to drift, we remind you of why you're here."
Music started playing, harsh, discordant metal that made her teeth ache. It was deafeningly loud, pounding through speakers she couldn't see.
"Stop!" Liora shouted, but she could barely hear her own voice over the noise. "Please, stop!"
They didn't stop.
The third hour was when the real torture began. Liora tried everything to stay awake. She paced the small confines of her cage, stepping carefully around the photographs she couldn't bear to look at. She recited poetry she'd memorized as a child. She counted the bars of her cage over and over, forty-seven vertical bars, twenty-three horizontal, anything to keep her mind active.
But the music was relentless. The lights were blinding even through her closed eyelids. And exhaustion was creeping through her body like poison. She sat down, just for a moment, her back against the bars. Her eyes drifted closed.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The male guard was hitting the bars with what looked like a metal pipe, the sound reverberating through the cage like a bell. Liora jerked awake, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might explode.
"Wakey wakey, Princess," he singsonged. "No rest for the wicked."
"I didn't do anything," Liora sobbed, tears streaming down her face. "Please, you have to believe me....."
"We don't have to believe anything," the female guard said. She pulled out her phone and held it up, showing Liora the security footage again. The woman with Liora's face, leading the attack. Shooting Aria Nightfang. Directing the massacre. "That's not me," Liora whispered for the hundredth time.
"Then who is it?" the guard challenged. "Your twin? Your clone? A really good actress who just happens to have your exact face, your exact voice, your exact DNA?"
"I don't know!" Liora screamed, frustration and fear boiling over. "I don't know who that is or how they look like me, but it's NOT ME! I was in Valeria that night! I was at a gala! There were hundreds of witnesses!"
"Funny thing about that," the male guard said, checking his own phone. "We reached out to some of those witnesses. Asked them about the gala three months ago. Want to know what they said?" Liora's blood ran cold. "They said you left early. Complained of a headache. Disappeared around 9 PM and nobody saw you again until the next morning." He smiled. "Plenty of time to fly to Blackmoor, murder fifty-three werewolves, and fly back."