In a place like that, questions had a way of attracting attention, and attention wasn’t something she could afford without understanding what she was dealing with. Instead, she kept it to herself, turning it over in her mind, tracing back through weeks, through interactions, through moments that might have gone unnoticed at the time but now demanded to be reexamined.
There had been… small things.
Doors that took a second too long to lock.
A guard who lingered where others didn’t.
Footsteps in the corridor at hours when the schedule said there should be none.
At the time, they had registered as irregularities, nothing more. But now, they aligned into something else entirely.
Something that made her stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the pregnancy itself.
In the surveillance room, the air felt colder than the rest of the facility, though whether that was by design or simply a side effect of the equipment running constantly, Victor had never quite determined. Rows of monitors lined the wall, each one displaying a different angle of the prison—corridors, cells, common areas, entrances and exits—all feeding into a system that was meant to ensure nothing went unseen.
Victor stood behind the technician, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the screen as footage began to play.
At first, there was nothing.
