When Gianna awoke, it took a few seconds of disorientation and reorientation—those slow, fog-thick seconds where the mind swims before anchoring—to realize that she wasn't in that bleak, dark warehouse that smelled of despair, that almost ate her life.
That she wasn't on cold concrete. That she wasn't bound. That the air around her didn't reek of dust and cruelty.
That she wasn't under the hands of those leery, evil men, as she had been in her dreams—hands that lingered too long, eyes that stripped her bare even in sleep.
That she was in her room, on her familiar bed, the mattress dipping gently beneath her weight, the sheets soft against her skin… familiar ceilings.
A shaky sigh of relief escaped her lips, even as her eyelids burned and became wet.
But she didn't let the tears drop. She blinked them back stubbornly. She thought she had cried enough. Surely, there had to be a limit to how much a person could cry.
