She was still on the windowsill when she heard it.Her name.
Her actual name, not girl, not little cosmos, not substitute. Her name, said with an urgency she had not heard from anyone since the rain soaked road outside the event.
Something about the sound of it pulled at her from the inside in a way she did not have an explanation for.
She stepped back from the window.
The men in black filled the room around her before she had fully turned, forming a circle so complete and so fast that the window behind her suddenly felt very far away. She stood in the centre of them and said nothing, her breathing steady, her face giving nothing away.
Ravi gave the order with chilling indifference. "Send her to the red room."
The men seized Aine without mercy. She fought frantically, kicking and screaming that she did not want to go anywhere, begging them to let her go, but their grips were like steel. They dragged her through the long, freezing corridors and shoved her violently into the sad room.
The moment the heavy door slammed shut, a blood-red glow filled the space. The air was ice-cold, raising violent shivers across her skin. On a metal table to the side lay an arsenal of whips ,thick braided leather, ones tipped with small metal barbs, and others studded with cruel knots. Tears poured down Aine's face as she collapsed onto the freezing floor, her body already trembling with terror.
Hours passed in suffocating silence. Then, without warning, the red lights died. Complete, pitch-black darkness swallowed her whole. The cold deepened. Aine's heart hammered so violently she could barely breathe as her deep phobia clawed its way to the surface. Slow, deliberate footsteps echoed in the blackness. She heard the soft clink of leather being lifted from the table.
"Who is that?" she whispered in terror. "Please… please don't whip me…"
From his height and menacing presence, she knew it was Ravi. He said nothing. The first lash cracked through the air like lightning and tore across her back. White-hot agony exploded through her flesh. She screamed and tried to scramble away, but in the total darkness she crashed blindly into walls. The whip came down again and again vicious, unrelenting, savage. Each strike felt like fire ripping her skin open. Blood soon slicked her back, her shoulders, her thighs.
She ran desperately, stumbling and falling, only for the whip to find her again. Lash after brutal lash rained across her body. Her voice grew hoarse from screaming. When her legs finally gave out, she crawled to his feet in pure desperation, grabbing the whip with both trembling hands, pressing her forehead to the floor.
"I beg you… please spare me, sir," she sobbed brokenly. "I can't feel my body anymore. It's just pain… everywhere. I'm bleeding from my forehead, my back, my feet… Please, sir… I'm begging you…"
Ravi let out a low, amused chuckle that chilled her to the bone. He dropped the whip with a clatter. Without another word, he turned and walked out, the heavy door locking behind him with a final, echoing click.
"Sir! Please don't leave me here alone!" Aine screamed, her voice cracking. "I'm afraid of the dark… Sir, please!"
She pounded on the door until her fists were raw and bloody, screaming until her throat burned raw. No one came. Eventually, utterly broken, she curled into a tight ball on the freezing floor, her body slick with blood and sweat. In the suffocating darkness she began tapping her head slowly, singing the lullaby her mother used to sing to her as a child. Her voice cracked and shattered into quiet, heart-wrenching sobs.
"Mummy… please… where are you?" she whispered between broken cries. "I need you… I'm so scared… I can't do this anymore…"
Tears poured endlessly down her face as memories of her mother flooded her mind warm hugs, soft songs, the safety she had lost forever. She felt completely alone, violated, and destroyed. The pain in her body was nothing compared to the emptiness crushing her heart. She cried until she had no tears left, whispering her mother's name like a broken prayer in the darkness.
Hayland stood outside the door and listened.
He had told himself he would not. He had walked past twice already and kept moving and told himself it was not his business and that this was simply how things worked in this world and that he had known that long before tonight.
But the singing undid him.
Something small and cracked and desperately young coming through a locked door in the dark, reaching for a mother who was not there, in a voice that had already been used up on screaming.
She was nineteen years old. A girl who had lived a quiet, sheltered life before one rainy night pulled her out of it and dropped her here. And in the space of days this house had taken something from her that it had no right to touch.
He straightened and walked directly to where Ravi sat with his tequila, unhurried and unmoved.
Ravi looked up. "What is it?"
Hayland looked at him for a moment. "You have been cruel enough for one night." He held his gaze. "Go and let her out."
Enough
"Why should I?" Ravi set his glass down without looking up. "She is lucky I did not kill her."
Hayland stood his ground. "She is nineteen years old. She did nothing to you personally. And everything you wanted from this situation you have already taken." He kept his voice level, the way you keep a flame level in wind. "She has nothing left to give."
Ravi looked at him for a long moment. When he spoke his voice had dropped to somewhere quiet and final. "Are you done? Leave this room before you exhaust what little patience I have remaining." A pause. "You know what happens when that runs out. You have seen it happen to people closer to me than you."
Hayland looked back at him and said nothing more.
But he did not apologise either