Now she had the stress, the fear that never really subsided, and she had nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Nothing to see, and no one to talk to.

But she had her hands, and that gave her the will to live again.

I will not fade away into the dark, she thought. I will not.

So I must decide what I will do. Otherwise I’ll degenerate into counting pebbles incessantly in the dark.

I will stay fit. Somehow, at some point, I’m going to get a chance to get out of here, and I’ll need to be ready.

I will practice my music. I don’t have any instruments to play, and I can’t write down any music, but I can still compose songs in my mind.

I have my memory. I have my will.

I have my intellect and imagination.

The first thing she did every morning was exercise. Being a professional musician was strenuous work, and if she didn’t look after her body, she ended up with back and neck strain. So if her running stride was approximately 1,700 steps in a mile, then in order to run three miles she needed to get in 5,100 steps before she did anything else.

(Plus she got to count something!… AGGGHHH! When she got free of this nightmare, she was going to need a whole lot of therapy.)

Standing, she went through a series of stretches. Then she jogged in a circle around her cell, careful to avoid the cot, the walls, and the privy in the corner.

When she reached the right number of steps, she stopped and let herself have some of her grapes as a reward. She ate twenty-one as she fingered her twenty-one pebbles. Then she began to run through the fingering of the musical scale as she conjured up the sound of her violin in her mind.

As she did so, her thoughts drifted to her last concert. Brandon’s tempo had been weak in the third number, and Derrick needed to cut back on the bass. She made mental notes of the things she had wanted to discuss with her band in Paris.

If… her thoughts faltered. When she got out of this hellhole, hopefully the time slippage won’t have been too significant. It had taken her a lot of work to find the right backup with the right chemistry. She wanted to make sure she reached out to them as soon as she could before they found other gigs.

The momentum she built for herself crumbled.

She had eleven grapes left, along with half a small loaf of bread, and the gray, formless day was interminable. Occasionally she still heard the soft, quiet scurry of something small nearby, and the distant sound of tired sobbing never ceased. Compassion for whatever it was warred with the increasing desire to scream at it to shut up, until she felt as if her head might explode.

Finally hunger grew uncomfortable enough that she ate the last of the food and shrugged into her filthy hoodie for what comfort and warmth it gave. She had read somewhere once that the temperature underground remained a constant fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. While that was certainly survivable, it wasn’t comfortable, especially without enough calories to burn as fuel.

It seemed like forever until the bright fire of the torch began to brighten the walls of her cell as the guard brought her another inedible meal. As before, she waited until the guard strode away before taking the bowl and the cup to the privy.

This time it was a lot harder to throw the stew and water away, but she did. Afterward, she climbed onto the cot, curled into a ball, wrapped her arms around her legs, and waited. And waited.

He didn’t come. He didn’t come.

He didn’t come.

After a long, formless time of waiting, tears welled up and spilled over. It had taken all her strength just to get through one dark day, and while she hadn’t wanted to rely so desperately on him showing up, she had.

Maybe something had happened to him. Maybe this whole thing was just a cruel, sick joke.

Maybe he was Modred. Modred was on intimate terms with Isabeau—maybe he was the man her kidnapper, Robin, had referred to. When she had first met him, Modred had seemed perfectly acceptable, even charming at first, before he’d shown utter indifference to Isabeau’s order and had personally seen to executing it.

At the memory of him breaking her fingers, she felt nauseous and wanted to vomit, except she refused to let go of the precious little liquid and nutrition she had in her stomach. She took deep, even breaths until the nausea passed.

Just when she thought she couldn’t take any more uncertainty, despair, and paranoia, her overtaxed body decided it’d had enough, and besides, there wasn’t any reason not to, so she spiraled into sleep and dreamed Modred broke all her fingers with smiling efficiency, no matter how she screamed and begged. Her thumbs, as well.

She woke all at once to a hard hand pressed over her mouth. Adrenaline screamed at her to move. When she would have struggled, she discovered something hard and unyielding pinned one of her arms to the cot while another hand gripped her other wrist.

“Don’t hit me.”

The soft growl came from overhead. Despite the darkness and the fact that she had never heard him speak in anything but a whisper, she recognized it. Recognized him.

Relief and gladness chased after the surge of adrenaline. Even as she tried to figure out just how he had pinned her, she nodded in quick response. As he slowly released her wrist, his other hand lifted from her mouth. The hard pressure that pinned her other arm to the cot lifted, and she realized he’d used the weight of one knee to immobilize her.

She bolted to a sitting position and swung her legs off the cot. The leather strips creaked as he sat beside her. Easy tears stung her eyes again. Fiercely glad he couldn’t see them, she whispered, “I did as you said and threw away the food and water. Then I thought you weren’t going to come.”

There was a pause as he seemed to assimilate all that her sentence implied. Then he told her, “I got held up. Unfortunately, there were complications.”

What complications? The last time he had been here, he hadn’t been well. She laced trembling fingers together and twisted them. Whoever he was, he was virtually her only link to survival. “Are… are you all right?”

When he answered, his whisper was warmer, gentler. “I am now. I bet you’re ready for some food and water.”

“Oh God, yes.”

Listening intently, she heard a brush of cloth, and the quiet sound of a zipper.

He pressed a flask into her hand. “First things first. Here’s water.”

Snatching at it, she fumbled to get the top open and drank thirstily until the flask was dry. When she finished, he took the flask from her, then grasped her fingers to guide her hand forward and down to what felt like an open canvas bag or backpack.