Chapter 7 7

The sensation of falling stopped with a bone-shattering impact.

Beth gasped, her eyes snapping open, but she wasn't awake. The heavy sedatives Dr. Finch had forced upon her dragged her consciousness down into a suffocating, feverish nightmare.

She was trapped in a vast, endless white space that looked horrifyingly like the sterile clinic where Finch had diagnosed her. But the walls were stretching, warping, grinding against each other with the deafening roar of metal.

She tried to run, but she couldn't move. She looked down. Thick, heavy restraints-like the leather straps of a straitjacket-were wrapped violently around her arms and chest, binding her in place.

It wasn't physical pain. It was worse. It felt like a jagged knife was scraping against the inside of her skull, tearing at her identity. The nightmare was a manifestation of the gaslighting, the lies, the systemic abuse the Langley family had inflicted on her for years.

In the shadows of the dream, faceless figures in bespoke suits circled her, whispering her failures, telling her she was insane, telling her she belonged in a cage.

"You will accept your exit," a voice echoed, sounding like a distorted blend of Lachlan and Finch. "You are unstable. You are nothing."

Beth squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the agonizing tearing sensation in her mind. She felt the memory of Martha's warm hands, the memory of her mother's face, being violently clouded by the drugs.

"No," Beth whispered. Her voice was weak in the dream, easily swallowed by the roaring noise.

She forced herself to remember the physical world. She remembered the broken glass cutting her foot. She remembered the cold metal of her phone in her pocket. She remembered the audio recording.

She stopped fighting the restraints physically. She went completely still.

She gathered every ounce of her willpower, every shred of hatred she had for Lachlan, for Brenda, for this entire fabricated existence. She compressed that rage into a single, razor-sharp point in her mind.

She aimed it directly at the paralyzing fear the nightmare was feeding her.

With a guttural scream that tore her throat raw even in the dream, she violently yanked her arms outward. She imagined the restraints shattering, the lies breaking under the weight of her fury.

The white walls of the nightmare began to violently crack and disintegrate. The sterile room collapsed around her, blowing away like ash in a hurricane.

But instead of waking up, the dream shifted. The sheer force of her psychological resistance pushed her deeper into her subconscious, past the recent trauma, straight into the foundational wound of her life.

A massive gravitational pull grabbed her mind, dragging her violently down into a pitch-black abyss.

All sound vanished. All light died.

She floated in absolute, terrifying nothingness.

Then, piercing through the dark, came a sound.

It was a high-pitched, terrified scream. The scream of a little girl.