Page 55 of Mission Shift

“Tell me why you were helping the American!”

I tried to focus, but my head was spinning. I was losing track, losing the sense of where I was. Losing myself.

I blinked at him. “I—I was just trying to help…” My voice was barely a whisper. “He was an innocent.”

The truth was the easiest thing to tell under interrogation. “I had no fucking idea who he was.”

Fedorov’s face twisted into a scowl, his smirk vanishing.

“You expect me to believe,” he snarled, leaning close to my face, “that an American just fell out of the sky, right into your lap, and you never once questioned what the fuck he was doing there?”

I pressed my lips together, biting back a sarcastic remark and earning another jolt.

“I know you’re not that stupid!” he bellowed, spit flying, his fury vibrating in the air between us. “What information did you give him?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. I gave him nothing.”

His fist crashed into my cheek. My head snapped sideways, my vision exploding in a white-hot burst, and for a moment, I was weightless, floating in the nothingness of pain.

Fedorov shouted something, but it was muffled, distant.

I couldn’t feel my toes.

Or my fingers.

The ice water seeped deeper, threading into my bones, turning my blood to slush.

Then—

Red-hot pain.

A current ripped through my body again like a bolt of lightning.

My mind fractured.

Time was no longer linear. There was only suffering.

Electricity.

Ice.

How long had it been?

Seconds. Hours. Days.

Another shock.

Another plunge.

The pain twisted reality, turned it inside out, made it impossible to separate the now from the before.

I was breaking.

They would leave me brain-dead at this rate.

A garbled plea left my lips before I could stop it.

“Just—just kill me.”

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