Kael's POV
Hours had passed by, and deep in the night, the sterile laboratory fell into a heavy, suffocating quiet. The constant, ambient hum of the monitoring machines was the only sound left in the room. I kept my eyes closed, tracking the precise mechanical sweep of the security camera mounted in the far corner of the ceiling. When the lens rotated away from my enclosure, I slowly shifted my heavy body, turning to a blind side of the camera where the angles couldn't capture the small movements of my hands.
Once I was safely hidden in the shadows, I went straight back to work. I pulled the broken glass shard from my pocket and tried to scramble the cuffs on my wrists and ankle. The primary electronic lock on my neck had fried easily, but these lower restraints were a completely different story. They proved much harder than the one on his neck, engineered with a double-layered titanium latch that required immense precision to pick.
