CHAPTER 43: CHAPTER FORTY THREE

The dark room was a cold, damp tomb deep within the foundations of the Thompson estate. It was a place designed to break spirits. There was no furniture, only a hard, unforgiving stone floor and a single, tiny window, high up in the wall, too small to crawl through, offering not light, but a mocking, silver-gilt square of the night sky.

Lorena was a broken heap in the center of this void.

Her back felt as if it were on fire, a sea of raw, agonizing pain from the fifty lashes. Every breath was a fresh torment, her ribs aching, her skin screaming. She had been thrown in here hours ago, her body still bleeding, with nothing. No blanket. No food. No water.

She grunted, a low, animal sound of misery, as she reached a trembling hand in the darkness. Her fingers brushed against a coarse, earthenware jar. Water. They must have left her water.

She fumbled for it, her fingers clumsy and weak. She tried to lift it, but it tumbled from her grasp, rolling on the floor. It was light. Empty. It bumped against the wall and, with a final, pathetic crack, it broke.

A sob, dry and ragged, was torn from her parched throat. There wasn’t even a single drop inside.

She hugged her knees, pulling them close to her chest, trying to make herself small, to shield her wounded back from the cold that seeped from the stones. She looked up at the tiny, mocking square of moonlight. It was so far away, so indifferent. She was going to die here, she realized. Forgotten, in the dark, in the cold, dying of thirst.

She sobbed, her body shaking, the movement sending fresh waves of agony through her.

CLICK.

The sound of a key turning in the heavy iron lock was so sudden, so unexpected, that her sobs caught in her throat. She froze, her head snapping up. A guard? Had the Dowager forgiven her? Or had they come to finish her?

The heavy door creaked open, a long, vertical rectangle of dim, torch-lit hallway cutting into the blackness of her cell. A figure stood silhouetted against the light, wrapped in a dark cloak. The figure stepped inside, and the door was pushed shut again, plunging the room back into near-total darkness, save for the faint moonlight and the small lantern the visitor carried.

The visitor set the lantern on the floor. In its weak, golden glow, Lorena saw the face. It was Ashlyn.

"Miss Lorena," Ashlyn whispered, her voice filled with pity and concern.

Lorena could only stare, her mind too broken and dehydrated to understand. Ashlyn rushed to her side, kneeling on the filthy floor. From beneath her heavy cloak, she produced a small, metal water can.

"Here," Ashlyn said, her voice a kind, urgent whisper. "You must be so thirsty. Have a drink."

The sight of the water, the sound of it sloshing, was more than Lorena could bear. With a choked, desperate sound, she lunged for the can, grabbing it with both hands. She pressed it to her cracked, bleeding lips, gulping down the cool, life-giving liquid. She drank all of it, every last drop, the water spilling down her chin, her body shaking with the sheer relief of it.

"Ashlyn," Lorena rasped, her voice a raw, broken thing. She let the empty can fall to her side. "I... I knew you would come. I knew you wouldn’t abandon me." She reached out, her hands, sticky with her own dried blood, and grasped Ashlyn’s.

"Quickly. Save me from here. We have to get out." Her mind, re-energized by the water, was already turning back to its one, single purpose: revenge. "That witch, Marissa. She did this to us. When I get out of here, I swear, I will tear her apart."

She tried to push herself up, to stand, to prove she was still strong, but her legs were weak, her back a sheet of pure, debilitating pain. She collapsed back to the floor with a sharp cry.

"But in this state," Ashlyn said, her voice still soft, but the pity in it was different now. It was no longer kind; it was condescending. "I truly pity you." She looked down at the broken woman at her feet, and the last traces of sympathy evaporated from her face, replaced by a look of cold, clear hatred. "But you may never return to the Thompson family, Lorena. In fact, you will never leave this room."

Lorena’s blood ran cold. The water in her stomach suddenly felt like a block of ice. "What... what do you mean?"

Ashlyn leaned in, her pretty face close to Lorena’s, her cloak a dark, suffocating tent around them. She whistled, a soft, mocking, airy sound. "I was just thinking," she whispered, her voice a cheerful, conversational secret. "If you get out of here... and you go back to plead your case... and they reopen the investigation... and they somehow find out that I was the one who actually poisoned Ryan... what then?"

The words did not make sense. They were a jumble of sounds, a language Lorena’s mind refused to process. Until it did.

I was the one who actually poisoned Ryan.

The world stopped. The cold, the pain, the darkness—it all vanished, replaced by a single, blinding, white-hot realization. It wasn’t Marissa. It was...

"It was you," Lorena breathed, her voice a hollow whisper of disbelief. Her eyes, wide and horrified, stared into Ashlyn’s. "You. You poisoned Ryan. It was you."

A final, desperate surge of adrenaline, fueled by a rage so profound it momentarily erased her pain, flooded her body. With a shriek that was more animal than human, she lunged, her hands flying to Ashlyn’s throat.

But it was a futile, pathetic gesture.

Ashlyn, healthy, strong, and prepared, didn’t even flinch. She simply shoved.

She pushed Lorena’s already weak, broken body backward with contemptuous ease. Lorena’s back slammed into the hard stone wall. A sharp, cracking sound, and an explosion of agony so intense it stole her breath, erupted from her back as her fresh wounds tore open. She cried out, a thin, gurgling sound, and slid down the wall, her body now completely useless.

Ashlyn stood up, slowly rubbing her neck where Lorena’s fingers had grazed her. "I thought you would be more useful," she sighed, her voice one of genuine disappointment. "I thought you would drive Marissa out completely. And once Ryan was dead, and Marissa was blamed and exiled, I would find a way to kill you, too. Two birds with one stone." She looked down at Lorena, who was now just a whimpering, bleeding mass on the floor. "But who knew you would be so useless? So incompetent?"

"How... how could you betray me?" Lorena sobbed, the words choked with blood and disbelief. "Why?" She tried to crawl, to get away, but her limbs wouldn’t obey.

"Why?" Ashlyn laughed, a light, tinkling sound in the dark, cold cell. It was the most terrible sound Lorena had ever heard. "You want to know why?"

She began to pace, a dark, circling shadow in the moonlight. "In my last life," she said, her voice casual, as if discussing with a friend. "You, Lorena, leaned on the Dowager’s favor to bully me at every turn. You humiliated me. You set the servants against me. You made my miserable, childless stay in that estate an unbearable, living hell."

She crouched down, her face once again close to Lorena’s, her eyes glittering with a cold, insane light. "I have dreamed of this day. I wish I could carve you into a thousand pieces, just like you carved away my dignity, day after day."

Lorena could only stare, her mind completely shattered. The pain, the betrayal... none of it made sense. There was only one thing she had heard.

"Last... Last life?" she whispered, her body trembling with a new terror.