Chapter 72

The room was cold, bare, windowless, uncompromising: perfect for interrogation. An unshaded bulb hung from the ceiling, struggling and failing to cast away the bleak shadows in the corners, and the furnishings consisted of a simple metal table and a simple metal chair, both bolted to the floor. The heavy iron door behind the chair had locked with a unnerving sound of finality as it closed shut, leaving the air in the room stale and fetid, and the single inhabitant of the room alone with her thoughts.

She was a woman in her early thirties, with long, shoulder-length chestnut hair and matching eyes that stared forward, as if genuinely interested in the random cracks in the brick wall opposite her. She sat in the chair, her wrists bound by leather straps to the arms of it, her ankles bound in identical fashion to the front legs of it. She swallowed, long past panic, more accepting that her current predicament wasn't some terrible nightmare, that it was painfully real.

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