Concrete Jungle || Bad Omens || Noah Sebastian

Prologue

The silence of the room was absolute. The stone walls seemed to absorb every sound, and the cold seeped into Noah's skin as his breath was the only thing he could hear. He opened his eyes with great effort. Everything was blurred, his head throbbing with pain. A metallic taste lingered on his tongue, and a trickle of dried blood crusted on his forehead. He tried to move, but every muscle felt as if it had turned to stone—rigid and aching. He didn't understand where he was or how he had ended up there.

The last thing he remembered was his home—the darkness of night, the sound of footsteps. Then, the cold and sudden impact of something against the back of his head.

He had just returned from an exhausting tour with his band. He remembered entering his house, leaving his suitcase still packed with clothes next to the sofa, thinking he would empty it after a nice long rest.

He heard muffled moans.

He turned abruptly, searching for the source. There, slumped against the opposite wall of the cell, was a figure—a girl, dark hair matted to her sweaty forehead, her skin pale as a broken doll. She breathed with difficulty, each breath a heart-wrenching sound that filled the small cell.

Her chest rose and fell with effort, a deep wound on her right shoulder from which blood had already congealed. Noah leaned towards her, but his hands trembled. He didn’t even know her name, yet there was something disturbingly familiar about the way her gaze was fixed on him. It seemed like she was waiting for him.

“Help me…” she whispered, her voice barely a thread, as if she had been there with him forever, as if she knew who he was.

He knelt beside her, his heart pounding in his ears. It was then that he noticed the deep wound in her abdomen, from which an excessive amount of blood flowed. “Stay calm, I…” he told her, his voice breaking with uncertainty as his gaze swept across the small cell, searching for something to staunch the bleeding. “I’ll help you, I promise.” But there was something strangely familiar about that promise, as if he had already made it before.

He cast a desperate glance at the girl beside him, her face a mask of pain. There was no time to waste, yet one question continued to pound in his mind, relentless: how the hell had they ended up there?

His breath quickened, the darkness around them seemed to close in. There was no way out—not yet.

But one thing was certain: whatever their captor wanted, he wouldn’t stop. And Noah, who didn’t even know if he could save himself, now had to save her.

Noah leaned over the girl, his breath growing quicker as he tried to control the panic tightening around his chest like an iron vise. The wound was worse than he had thought: blood continued to seep slowly from her abdomen, staining the white dress she wore and the stone floor beneath them. She trembled, her eyes fluttering open and closed intermittently, as if she were fighting to stay conscious.

“I have to stop the bleeding,” he murmured to himself. But how? There was nothing there that could help him, at least not at first glance. His frantic gaze darted around the cell, searching for anything that could serve as a bandage—anything at all.

With a swift motion, he tore off his black T-shirt, ripping it into shreds with trembling hands. The thin fabric wouldn’t hold for long, but it was all he had. He needed to act quickly. He took a strip of cloth and pressed it against the wound, trying to stem the flow of blood.

“Hold on,” he said to her, his voice cracked with terror. “I have to stop it, okay?”

The girl looked at him with hazy eyes, unable to speak, but she nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly. Her skin, already pale, seemed to grow more translucent with each passing second. Each breath was weaker than the last.

“Don’t die, don’t die, damn it…” Noah thought, pressing harder with his hands against the wound. Time seemed to stretch out, each second a challenge against death.

Then, suddenly, a new sound filled the room. A metallic screech, like a rusty gear turning. Noah looked up but couldn’t see anything. The sound seemed to come from the walls, from the ceiling, as if something was moving in the very bowels of the cell.

Then a door opened in a remote corner, almost invisible in the dim light. A small hatch, just large enough to drop a chipped plastic bucket inside. Water sloshed over the rim, and a few drops fell onto the stone floor.

Noah grabbed the bucket and approached the girl. Her head had fallen back, her chest barely rising. He gently lifted her head and brought the bucket to her lips, trying to get her to drink some water. She barely sipped a few drops before her body refused to make any further movement.

“You’ll be fine,” he whispered to her, not knowing if he was saying it for her sake or for his own.

Then he sat down next to her, his back against the cold wall. His mind raced, trying to understand. Who had put them there? Why? What had he done wrong to deserve such treatment?

But the questions that tormented him most were different. Who was this girl? And why was she in the cell with him, fighting for her life? But above all, who had kidnapped them? Who did this to her?

Noah glanced at the wound he had bandaged. It seemed to have slowed the bleeding, but it wouldn’t be enough. If he didn’t get her out of there quickly, she wouldn’t make it.

And he had no idea how to escape.