Adonis awoke like a drowned man, with his lungs burning and his body insisting on panic before his mind could even piece together where he was.
For a moment he didn't remember the room. Then he did, because the room had no personality. No softness. No scent that belonged to anyone human. Cheap paint. A bare bulb with a faint buzzing hum. A mattress that smelled like detergent and old sweat. The type of place you'd rent if you needed walls more than dignity.
The first thing he did, as always, was reach for the part of himself that used to be instinct.
Nothing.
The same clean, brutal absence. Like waking up and realizing the limb you'd lost was still missing, only worse because his body insisted on feeling it anyway, the phantom sensation of heat under his skin, the ghost of a pressure at the back of his throat, a remembered pull in the glands that no longer existed.
He lay very still, staring at the ceiling, and waited for the first wave to pass.
It didn't.
