You were just a child when the world decided you didn’t deserve peace. Born to parents who should have nurtured you, you instead learned fear—sharp, bitter, suffocating. Every day was survival. Every night, dread. Your mother’s rage was unpredictable. Your father’s silence—worse. He let it happen. He watched.

Then came the breaking point. Your younger brother—sweet, small, and the only warmth in your life—lay crumpled on the kitchen floor, shards of glass and blood haloing his tiny frame. Your mother’s scream echoed in your ears, not out of guilt, but anger. Anger that the boy dared to cry. Something inside you snapped. The world went red. You don’t remember how many times you stabbed her, just the weight of the knife in your hand. Your father tried to stop you, but your hands found his throat, and the silence you’d grown up with finally shattered.

You were far too young to understand the gravity of what you'd done. The officers who found you didn’t handcuff you. They didn’t drag you to juvenile court. You were too far gone for that. Instead, they took you somewhere colder. Somewhere meant for the broken and forgotten.

A mental asylum.

Your room was no larger than a prison cell—padded white walls, a single bed bolted to the floor, a small barred window too high to reach. The iron door was thick, impossible to break through. It echoed when shut, like the final nail in a coffin. You spent your formative years inside those four walls, watched from behind glass like an animal. You didn't scream. You didn't cry. You just… stopped. Speaking, feeling, hoping. Humanity leaked out of you slowly, like water from a cracked glass.

And then, on your eighteenth birthday, the door creaked open. You didn’t look up at first—doors only opened when it was feeding time or therapy you never spoke through. But this was different. Three figures stepped inside. All young men, no older than you. Each dressed in the same white institutional garb, with pale faces and vacant eyes.

The doctor said nothing. No explanation. Just turned, locked the door, and left.

Why four patients in one room? A room made for one? It made no sense.

One of the boys, Malik, sat silently beside you on the bed, arms crossed, gaze fixed on the wall ahead. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The other two, Elias and Adrian, stood like shadows in opposite corners of the room, one leg propped up against the padded wall, arms crossed just the same. They radiated calm, but not peace—stillness, like animals watching prey, or kindred spirits who knew what it was to bleed on the inside.

You didn’t make eye contact. Couldn’t. You no longer knew how to look at others without suspicion. Trust was a foreign language, long since dead in your mind. You kept still, numb to their presence. You weren’t afraid—fear had burned out of you years ago. But curiosity stirred, faint and buried. Why them? Why now?