𝓞𝓼𝓱𝓾𝓷 - 𝙸.Mɪᴅᴏʀɪʏᴀ

Chapter 78

▍south africa, security tower
𝐎 𝐒 𝐇 𝐔 𝐍
𝐢. 𝐦𝐢𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐲𝐚
78.   ✿ ↬

▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂

second person

"𝑭𝑶𝑹 𝑻𝑯𝑶𝑺𝑬 𝑰 love,
I will sacrifices."

It felt like handing your soul over with a polite signature. Sure, you made the paper, you held the pen, you spelled out every consequence in black ink—but knowing what you're doing doesn't make it feel any less like betrayal. There's no glamorous way to accept that you're about to let yourself be kidnapped and experimented on, semi-voluntarily, like some tragic volunteer tribute. For you, the whole thing sat in your stomach like something rotten.

The moment that bullet—laced with a neutralizer strong enough to bully your nervous system into silence—punched through your skin, everything went dark. You lasted maybe sixty seconds into the car ride before consciousness dropped you like a bad habit. Later, you learned the blackout wasn't just a nap; they carried your unconscious body through an entire international flight. Across the ocean. Across continents. All the way to South Africa.

When you woke, it wasn't gentle or cinematic. No soft light, no mysterious voice. Just the shock of ice water slamming into your skin while you were sprawled on a cold gold-tinted floor like discarded property. Your arms were chained to the wall above your head, tight enough to remind you you weren't going anywhere, loose enough to let you bang your fists against the metal door in a haze of instinct and fury.

⸻

𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐎𝐍𝐄

The first twenty-four hours weren't painful—they were psychological warfare. No tests, no needles, no slicing or prodding. Just you and the cage, face-to-face. They wanted you to settle into your imprisonment like it was a twisted hotel check-in. It was the prerequisite to the real suffering—the quiet acclimation before the storm.

The room was offensively plain. A tinted box with four claustrophobic walls, no windows, a slab of a bed, and a single lightbulb that flickered just often enough to make you question reality. A camera watched you from the corner, always humming faintly, like it was breathing.

The attached bathroom was barely a bathroom—one toilet, half a roll of toilet paper, another dim bulb, and shockingly, no camera. A small mercy. Apparently, they drew the line at monitoring your bathroom schedule. Too bad that decency didn't extend to, say, basic grooming products.

The humidity clung to everything, especially your hair. And freshly cut hair does not play fair with humidity. Your five inches soon puffed into an uneven, stubborn crown—majestic in theory, tragic in execution. By day three you had genuinely considered begging for a wide-tooth comb, a blow dryer, a single leave-in conditioner packet—something. But your dignity tapped you on the shoulder and reminded you:
Girl... focus. Hair is not your highest priority right now.