Chapter 4 - The Song in the Dark
For five long seconds, the phantom pain itself seemed caught off guard by the sheer absurdity of her answer.
Raphael Moretti lifted his torso up from the mattress, using his heavy shoulders to prop himself against the carved wooden headboard. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow gasps.
"What did you say to me?" he rasped, his eyes narrowing into cold slits.
"I said you missed," Sloan repeated, her voice perfectly even. "And given the size of this room, your aim is remarkably poor."
"I don't miss," Rafe growled, his hands immediately flying back to his right thigh, his fingers digging into his quadriceps as another wave of invisible agony racked his body. "Agh... damn it... get out! Get Daniel! Get whoever hired you and get the hell out of my room!"
"Daniel is downstairs getting ice," Sloan said.
She walked casually across the room, completely ignoring the broken glass on the floor, and pulled a heavy wooden armchair away from the wall. She set the chair three feet from the side of the bed—close enough to see the sweat glistening on his jaw, but far enough away that he couldn't reach her with an arm.
She sat down, smoothed the gray fabric of her skirt over her knees, and folded her hands in her lap.
"I have three rules in this house, Mr. Moretti," Sloan said quietly. "And leaving because you throw glassware isn't one of them."
Rafe let out a harsh, bitter laugh that ended in a sharp gasp of pain. He dragged his stump upward, pulling his right knee toward his chest as if trying to run away from a fire that was attached to his own nervous system.
"You think this is a joke?" he hissed, his face twisting in agony. "You think... you think you're brave because you didn't duck? My foot... my foot is sitting in a pool of boiling oil right now. I can feel the skin blistering. I can feel the nails being pulled back by iron hooks!"
He slammed his fist into the mattress twice.
"And it isn't even there!" he screamed, his voice cracking violently on the last word. "It isn't even there!"
Sloan looked at him.
She didn't offer a gentle smile. She didn't offer soft words of comfort. She didn't reach out to lay a sympathetic hand on his trembling shoulder.
She knew what sympathy looked like to a man who had commanded two hundred soldiers on the docks: it looked like pity, and pity felt like weakness.
"I know," Sloan said simply.
"You don't know anything!" he snarled.
Sloan inhaled slowly through her nose.
She recognized the state he was in. It wasn't just physical pain; it was a catastrophic sympathetic nervous system overload. His brain was stuck in an emergency fight-or-flight loop, sending frantic signals down severed peripheral nerves. The panic was amplifying the nerve pain, and the nerve pain was feeding the panic.
Drugs couldn't fix a feedback loop that was being driven by terror.
Sloan closed her eyes. She leaned her head back against the dark wood of the armchair.
And then, softly, clearly, she began to sing.
It wasn't a modern song. It was an old coastal ballad her grandmother used to sing in the kitchen of their small cottage in Narragansett when the winter fogs rolled over the bay—a simple, slow melody about a fishing boat navigating through dark water toward a lantern hanging in a cottage window.
“The water is wide, I cannot cross o'er…” “And neither have I wings to fly…”
Rafe froze. His dark eyes snapped to her face in absolute, speechless shock.
"Shut up," he spat.
Sloan didn't stop. She kept her voice low, resonant, and steady, keeping the tempo slow and rhythmic, like the rise and fall of gentle ocean swell against a wooden hull.
“Give me a boat that can carry two…” “And both shall row, my love and I…”
"I said shut up!" Rafe roared, raising his fist as if to strike the mattress again. "What is wrong with you? Stop singing!"
Sloan continued into the second verse, her tone dropping slightly into a lower, richer register. She didn't look at him; she kept her eyes fixed on the low yellow glow of the desk lamp in the corner.
The human brain is a biological engine. It cannot maintain peak panic adrenaline production when processing a predictable, rhythmic auditory stimulus from a non-threatening source.
By the end of the second verse, Rafe’s screaming had stopped.
By the third verse, his rapid, shallow breathing began to slow down involuntarily, his chest rising and falling in time with her slow, steady phrasing.
By the fourth verse, his thick fingers slowly began to uncurl from his thigh.
The pain hadn't vanished—Sloan knew better than that. The severed nerves were still firing their phantom signals into his parietal lobe. But the panic that made the pain intolerable had been drained out of the room, replaced by the sheer, hypnotic rhythm of a human voice.
Ten minutes passed.
Sloan finished the last line of the ballad, letting the final note fade naturally into the warm, quiet air of the bedroom.
The room was completely still. The only sound was the soft crackle of dying embers in the hearth.
Raphael Moretti lay back against the headboard, his arms resting limply at his sides, his chest moving in long, deep, regular breaths. His single open eye was staring fixedly at the dark beams of the ceiling.
"You sing terribly," he whispered, his voice dry as ashes.
Sloan adjusted her gray dress and sat up straight.
"And you throw terribly," she replied smoothly.
For a fraction of a second—a fleeting moment that lasted less than the blink of an eye—the corner of Raphael Moretti’s mouth twitched upward into a faint, exhausted smile.
It disappeared before it could fully form.
At that moment, the bedroom door opened softly, and Daniel Bishop stepped inside, carrying a zinc basin filled with ice water and clean white towels.
May you like
Daniel stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes darting from the broken glass on the floor to Rafe lying quietly on the bed, and finally to Sloan sitting calmly in the armchair.
"Leave the basin on the table, Daniel," Sloan said, standing up. "And bring a broom. Mr. Moretti made a mess."
