Page 38 of Say You're Mine

And together, my valkyrie, my Boudica, my queen of wreckage and ruin...

We will teach them the true meaning of fear.

The lights flicker overhead, a sickening strobe that sears my retinas and sends shards of pain lancing through my skull. Or maybe it's just the aftershocks of Faulkner's latest round of "therapy," the electrodes still sizzling against my temples, the acrid stench of singed flesh and despair heavy in the air.

I don't know anymore. Don't know where the torture ends and I begin.

The door creaks open, and I flinch, a pavlovian response to the sound that always heralds fresh agony. But it's not Faulkner who slips into my cell. It's Sarah, her face drawn and pale in the guttering light.

"June..." She breathes my name like a prayer and a curse, her eyes wide with horror as she takes in the ruin of my body, the wasteland of my soul.

I try to speak, but my tongue is a dead, desiccated thing in my mouth. I make a sound, a broken, animal noise that might be a laugh or a sob. Sarah flinches as if I've struck her.

"I don't have much time," she whispers, glancing over her shoulder at the door. "I managed to disable Faulkner's system, but it won't last long."

She presses something into my hand, cold and hard and unfamiliar. A phone. For a moment, I just stare at it, uncomprehending. Such a simple thing, a relic of a life I can barely remember.

"It's Cara." Sarah's voice is urgent, insistent. "She needs to hear your voice, June. She needs to know you're still fighting."

Cara. The name is a knife in my gut, a balm on my shattered psyche. I lift the phone to my ear with a trembling hand, half expecting it to dissolve into smoke and ashes.

"June?" Her voice is a distant echo, a half-remembered melody. "June, baby, are you there?"

I try to answer, but the words clog in my throat, choked by the bile and the blood and the screams I've swallowed back for so long. Cara keeps talking, a desperate, pleading litany, but I can barely hear her over the roaring in my ears.

Her voice is wrong. It's not the warm honey and whiskey I remember, not the sultry purr that made my blood sing. It's thin and reedy, sharp with an edge of hysteria.

"Don't fucking talk to me, you goddamn bitch." The words rip from my ravaged throat, a guttural snarl that I barely recognize as my own. "I don't know you and I don't fucking love you, you cunt! You're just another one of Faulkner's little fucking tricks. What'd he promise you? Huh? What'd he promise you after I break?"

Dead silence meets my vitriol. For a moment, I think the connection has been lost, that this was just another layer to the twisted game they're playing with my sanity. But then I hear it.

A sob. Small and broken and so achingly familiar that it pierces through the haze of rage and confusion like a bolt of pure, searing light.

"June..." Cara's voice is a cracked, trembling whisper. "June, what have they done to you?"

The anguish in her tone, the naked despair, hits me like a physical blow. It's real. She's real, not some twisted figment conjured by Faulkner to torment me.

"Cara..." I choke on her name, on the impossible tangle of love and loathing that rises like gorge in my throat. "Cara, I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. I don't...I can't..."

The words won't come, trapped behind the wall of trauma and confusion that Faulkner has erected in my mind. I hear Cara's ragged breathing, sense her struggle to hold back the flood of emotions threatening to drown us both.

"It's okay, baby." She forces the words out, each one a shard of glass. "It's going to be okay. I'm coming for you. I'm going to bring you home, I swear it."

Home. The concept is so foreign, so utterly inconceivable, that a harsh bark of laughter rips from my chest. But before I can respond, before I can give voice to the yawning void of hopelessness that threatens to swallow me whole...

The line goes dead.

I stare at the phone in my hand, watching as it blurs and fractures through the prism of my tears. Distantly, I register Sarah retrieving it, her touch gentle as a whisper.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and I can hear the ache of sincerity in her voice. "I'm so sorry, June."

Then she's gone, slipping away like a ghost, leaving me alone with the wreckage of my thoughts.

Cara. My Cara, my north star, my reason for drawing breath. She's out there, fighting for me, for us, even as I'm being unmade in this sterile hell. The thought brings a fresh wave of anguish, the jagged shards of my love for her tearing at my insides.

I fear...God help me, some small, twisted part...fears she's just one more sadistic illusion about to unravel any second. How can she be real? Her touch, her voice, her devotion - when everything else is designed to break and defile me without end?

What if this is the cruelest cut of all - Faulkner dangling her as salvation, only to pervert her into a weapon to finally shatter my mind beyond all repair? Can I bear that risk, that loss, without losing my last fingerhold on selfhood?

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