#inly

The words repeated over and over in Adam's head, stinging his aching heart as bile rose and settled in his throat. Ricocheting off the walls, echoing louder and louder even though they were only in his mind. He could feel his chest wavering while he tried to catch his breath through the fever, but not even the sound of his ragged breath could subdue Lawrence's voice. Adam was losing track of time and how long he'd been stuck in place as the pitch black swallowed everything around him, but the ticking clock kept going. Synchronizing and pulsing with his heartbeat, which only made his head spin more.

He felt as if his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets as they strained to overlook the darkness, growing a headache that he could feel in the deep depths of his whole cranium. He leaned his head back against the tile, resting the side of his head against what he could only assume was a pipe and squeezed his eyes shut.

He needed to get out of there.

The pressure in his stomach quivered dangerously and it took all of his strength to swallow the tension down, chin shivering through the need to vomit. In fact, his whole body was shivering; tears streaming down his face, knees shaking where they were pressed against his chest and teeth chattering to the point his jaw ached. Adam knew he was losing blood fast, but his focus on the ghost of Lawrence's voice couldn't cease as it was the only thing from making him truly lose his mind.

Or he had already lost his mind.

The glow-in-the-dark paint on the wall had been Adam's only source of light in the couple of hours after the door closed, but it wasn't long before it completely faded and the room had been just as dark as it was when he first woke up. Because of the lack of sight, Adam found his other senses to refine too quickly than he would've wanted and his suffering only heightened. The air's corpse smell only worsened, the blood on his hands and the dirt under his nails felt thicker, the void of silence could only throb louder.

He really needed to get out of there.

The rough metal of the shackle bit into Adam's ankle every time he tried to pull on the chain, a bruised ache forming around his gaunt bones. Rationally, he knew if he kept pulling on it then he could injure himself further, but it was that he wasn't rationally thinking. All he knew was that he wanted the chain off. Soon, there was a warm substance of what could only be blood start to build around his ankle and roll down his foot that made him stop short for a moment. He thought it was a good idea at first, pull on the chain until something happened, but he only stopped when a loud crack echoed in the room and his legs folded under him. Punching the floor, he angrily screamed until he could barely catch his breath, but only ended up crying, curled as tightly as he could on his side.

That fucking sucked.

Sitting now in silence besides his erratic breathing, Adam thought about the time he went to the beach as a kid. He wasn't sure why it came to mind so suddenly, but the memory seemed so vivid. He remembers how his family didn't normally have opportunities to do fun things like going to the beach together—his dad always either too busy getting drunk or too busy at work or just plain right too uninterested—but it was a day he couldn't forget. He was only six years old, straying from his brothers as he was so confident that he was old enough to be out on his own. Walking out in the shore a piece of seaweed had wrapped around his ankle just in time before a wave came and knocked him down. All he could think of was how cold the water was.

Maybe that's why the memory resurfaced so clearly. The way his fingers were trembling, the hairs on his arms standing straight up, his teeth chattering and his lungs growing tight like he was drowning. In his daze, he found it hard telling apart the memory from what he's seeing right in front of him—if he could see at all, at least. The shackle around his ankle shifted from the cold, sturdy feeling to soft and slimy with the likeness of seaweed.