Chapter 1203
One of the guards lifted a remote, and the door groaned open with an ear-splitting roar.
Elliana and Cole lunged forward, hungry for any view of what lay beyond, but what greeted them made their hearts sink like stones.
The chamber beyond stood in brutal opposition to the clinical hallways they’d just traversed. It revealed itself as a primitive, crumbling cavern swallowed by near-complete darkness. An icy wind rushed out, saturated with the smell of wet soil and hopelessness, sending shivers racing down their spines.
Cole’s eyes widened. His mother and grandmother were trapped in this hellhole. The realization struck him like a physical blow. Anguish coiled in his stomach, and his hands, dangling powerlessly at his sides, balled into trembling fists.
“Follow me,” the guard instructed, his voice stripped bare of emotion as he crossed the threshold first. Elliana and Cole pressed forward behind him.
Past the iron door stretched another cramped corridor. They walked for what felt like an eternity before arriving at Sophie’s cell, the air growing increasingly frigid and moisture-laden with each step.
Where the corridor terminated, the passage widened into a cavern studded with rows of iron cages. Within each one, figures crouched in shredded clothing. Some had been savagely beaten, their bodies motionless and soundless on the precipice of death. Others extended skeletal arms through the bars, their desperate cries reduced to guttural murmurs. This was the Griffiths family dungeon—a manifestation of hell itself.
Cole’s eyes blazed crimson, inflamed with fury and anguish. The sight of the cages unleashed a renewed torrent of suffering through him, so intense that he thought his heart might split apart.
His gaze darted wildly from one cell to the next, hunting for his mother. He studied each shattered form, caught between the frantic hope of discovering her and the nauseating terror that he actually would.
Suddenly, the guard slammed his fist against the bars of a nearby cage, the metallic crash reverberating through the cavern. “Sophie!” he shouted. “You’ve got a visitor.”
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Cole spun around.
Crouched in the corner of that cage sat two emaciated figures, their garments reduced to tatters, their hair caked with grime and filth.
At the guard’s voice, both women gradually raised their heads, their eyes hollow and unfocused as they gazed at Cole.
One woman’s face had been ravaged into a landscape of scar tissue, her features warped beyond any possibility of recognition. This was Sophie.
Sophie had never imagined she would encounter her son in this place. From the instant Maxine’s men seized her, she had accepted that she would never lay eyes on him again. The sole force that had sustained her grip on this miserable existence was the image of him preserved in her memory.
“Cole…” The name emerged from her as a shredded whisper, barely a voice at all, yet it quavered with disbelief and a flood of unthinkable joy.
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