The mask was still on.

That was the first thing he registered and the last that made sense.

They hadn’t taken it.

Not during the fight or when they dragged him down here. Not after. Whoever it was—whoever had gone to the trouble of knocking him unconscious and keeping him alive—had left it untouched. A small, precise cruelty. No one left the mask. No one respected it. Not without reason. Not unless they wanted something.

He didn’t know which unsettled him more.

He leaned back against a concrete wall, the movement stiff and slow. Wrists ached from the restraints—tied, not cuffed. Everything was deliberate. He could still feel the echo of the injection point in his neck, the dull throb of whatever chemical sludge they’d used to keep him down long enough to move him. It wasn’t military-grade. Something messier. Street stuff, maybe. It blurred edges, but not memory. The last thing he remembered was heat. Then hands. Then blankness.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been stuck here. Time had folded in on itself, hours bleeding into each other like ink in water. There were no windows. No clocks. Just the low buzz of electricity through unseen wires and the occasional hum of air through vents.

The room wasn’t a cell, not exactly. No bars. No cameras he could see. No flickering neon signs screaming captivity. It was worse than that. Empty. Clean. Purpose-built. He knew what it meant when someone took their time to prepare a space like this. This wasn’t a ransom job. It wasn’t political. Not professional, even. This was personal.

He shifted, barely, the chain at his ankles rattling just enough to remind him it was real. The air was cool and dry. No mold, no rot. Whoever owned this place had money, or at least discipline. That didn’t bode well. He knew how amateurs operated—sloppy, loud, afraid of their own shadows. This wasn’t that.

He hadn’t screamed. Not when he woke up. Not when he realized where he was. Screaming was for people who still thought rescue was coming.

He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that anymore.

He maintained his breathing even behind the mask. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Repeat. Not because he was scared. Not really. But the space inside his head had grown loud lately, and the quiet of the room gave it too much room to echo.

Still—he wasn’t broken. Not yet. Ghost had lived through worse, crawled out of worse. He had been interrogated before, tortured, scarred and stitched back together in places no one ever saw.

Yet, there was something about this place. This stillness. This absence of obvious motive. The kind of thing that settled under your ribs and made itself at home.