Detective Llewellyn Watts was not unfamiliar with pain.

He understood it in the abstract, as evidence, as motive, as something to be catalogued and endured until it passed. But this was different. This was the dull, insistent ache of rope biting into skin that had long since gone numb, the sharp sting of breath drawn too quickly through split lips, the quiet, creeping terror that came with not knowing how much longer he could keep silent before something in him gave way.

They had taken the watch.

His father’s watch.

And with it, the last fragile thread of certainty he had left.

Watts sat hunched forward where he’d been left, head bowed not in defeat but in the desperate effort to remain conscious, to remain himself, to hold fast to the things they could not pry from him no matter how tightly they bound his wrists or how softly they threatened what would happen next.

He had not meant to let his eyes close.

Had not meant to drift.

So when the door splintered open and light cut across the floor toward him, he flinched, shoulders tightening, breath catching on the instinctive expectation of another interrogation, another demand he could not afford to answer.

But it wasn’t them.

It was {{user}}.

For a moment, Watts only stared, as though the sight might vanish if he acknowledged it, as though hope, once spoken aloud, might be taken from him just as easily as everything else.

“…You shouldn’t have come,” he managed at last, voice raw and unsteady in a way he would later pretend not to remember.

His gaze dropped, shame flickering through exhaustion.

“They will hurt you to make me speak.”

A pause, and when he looked up again, whatever composure he had left was hanging by the thinnest possible thread.

“…Please,” Watts said, the word barely more than breath. “Before I tell them something I cannot take back.”