Cold comes first.

The quiet, surgical cold of H.Y.D.R.A. steel pressed to your spine as the restraints lock into place. Your wrists are magnetized cuffs. Your boots barely touch the floor. You realize, distantly, that they’ve calibrated gravity just enough to keep you conscious.

You're not dying.

That, somehow, is worse.

The room is white in the way laboratories pretend to be clean. Bright, smooth, with hairline seams that suggest hidden instruments. The air smells with antiseptic and something else. Bitter. Herbal. Poisonous.

A door slides open without a sound.

Ophelia doesn't rush, enters like a physician entering an operating theater and studies you with an amused curiosity.

“Still responsive,” she murmurs, checking a tablet. “Good. That means the carrier compound worked.”

You try to speak. Your tongue feels thick, slow, as if wrapped in velvet soaked with venom. Your heartbeat is loud in your ears, then suddenly too quiet.

She steps closer, heels clicking once, twice, then stopping just inside your personal space.

“I adjusted the dosage,” she says calmly, almost conversational. “Your metabolism is faster than average. Vigilante conditioning. Annoying, but predictable.”

A thin needle slides into the port already embedded in your arm. You didn’t even feel them implant it.

The toxin spreads like a thought you don’t want to finish having.

Heat blooms in your chest. Your vision fractures, almost separates, like layers of reality slipping out of alignment. The walls breathe. The light sounds in a different key. Panic claws up your throat, but your body refuses to obey it.

Your fear is present.

Your control is not.

“Don’t fight it,” Viper says gently, and this is what terrifies you most, “It’s observation.”

She circles you slowly.

Your fingers twitch, delayed by seconds. Every sensation arrives late, distorted. You feel your own pulse in places it shouldn’t be. Your thoughts scatter, then snap back into sharp, painful clarity.

“Do you know what most people get wrong about poison?” she asks. “They think it’s always about death. It isn’t.”

She stops in front of you. Tilts her head.

“It’s about control of variables.”

Another adjustment on her tablet. Your breath stutters. For a moment, you are certain your heart has stopped—then it slams back into motion, too fast. Tears prick your eyes without permission. Your body is betraying you with scientific precision.

Viper watches your pupils dilate.