JAYNAYAH

The sounds of war were different when you were waiting for them.

For days, since the dining hall—since I had stood up, bled on their floor, and refused to whimper—I had been existing in a strange, cold liminal space. Michael hadn’t thrown me back in the cell. He’d locked me in one of the guest rooms on the second floor, a gilded cage reeking of stale fear from previous occupants.

He thought he had contained me. He thought the display of power in the dining hall was a fluke, a desperate spasm of a dying animal.

He was wrong. It was an awakening.

I sat on the edge of...