The sun came up, but the master bedroom stayed entirely dark.

Roxy didn’t open the thick curtains. She didn’t turn on the lights. She just sat on the soft, expensive carpet right next to the huge bed, pulling her knees tight against her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs.

Thousands of words were dancing in her head.

How do I survive this?

All my efforts, all the love I poured into my children?

Was it so hard to stay happy?

Should I just die?

Perhaps death is the best thing for me.

It was day one.

Outside the door, the men were also not good. They didn’t leave the hallway. She could hear them breathing, shifting their weight, and talking in low, worried whispers.

Torian was the first to try. He pressed his hand flat against the door. His deep voice came through the door, sounding so incredibly sad it would break anyone’s heart. "Roxy, please," Torian begged gently. "Just open the door a little bit. You don’t have to talk to us. You don’t even have to look at us. Just let me bring you a glass of water. I just need to know you are okay in there."

Roxy didn’t answer. She didn’t even move a single muscle.

Hours passed. The shadows in the room moved slowly across the floor.

Later in the afternoon, it was Caspian’s turn. His heart was bleeding for his wife. He stood quietly by the door, keeping his dignity, even though his voice trembled with deep, honest sorrow.

"My beautiful Roxann," Caspian whispered through the gap in the door. His voice was soft, carrying the heavy weight of a man who realized he had made a terrible mistake. "I am so deeply sorry. We were so blind. We were so afraid of losing you in that basement that we didn’t stop to think about what we were taking you away from. We were selfish. Please... don’t shut us out in the dark."

A single tear slipped out of Caspian’s eye on the other side of the door, but Roxy didn’t know that. She just rested her forehead on her knees. The lock stayed completely shut.

The bedroom was huge. It had the softest blankets, the nicest furniture, and a giant bathroom. But to Roxy, it wasn’t a home. It was just a very pretty and very expensive.

A vanity she could never appreciate.

She was completely consumed by depression. It wasn’t the kind of sad where you cry out loud and throw things.

It was the kind of sad that makes your whole body feel like it is made of heavy lead. Her arms and legs felt too heavy to lift. Her chest felt tight, making it hard to take a full breath. She felt totally, completely empty inside.

She needed help. She needed a way out.

When she used to live in Beastworld, she used to talk to the gods in her head, heck the system allowed her to talk to them.

She would just talk to them in her mind, like she was talking to an old friend. And back then, they used to answer her. They would give her a warm feeling in her chest, or a quiet thought that pointed her in the right direction.

Desperate, she closed her tired eyes and tried to do it again.

Hey, she thought, keeping her inner voice quiet and simple. Are you there? It’s me, Roxy.

She waited. The dark room was completely silent.

Please, she begged in her head. I know they broke the rules. Zarek said the door is closed forever. But there has to be a mistake. You can’t just let this happen. You can’t let my babies grow up all by themselves. Take me back. I don’t care what it hurts or what it costs. Just open a crack in the sky. Let me slip through. Please, just give me a sign that you hear me.

She held her breath. She waited for that old, familiar warm hum in her mind. She waited for a feeling of peace, or a whisper, or any tiny sign that someone up there was listening to a heartbroken mother. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

She sat there on the floor for a very, very long time.

But nothing happened.

There was no warm feeling. There was no quiet voice. The silence inside her head was total and complete. The human world was deaf to her. The gods of the Beastworld could not reach her here, and the gods of Earth were not listening. She was completely cut off from everything she believed in.

That was when the real, awful truth finally hit her.

She thought about her newborn baby. Her sweet, quiet little girl. Roxy had carried her for months. She had loved her before she even took her first breath. But Roxy didn’t even get to hold her after she was born.

She didn’t get to rock her to sleep or kiss her tiny fingers.

She didn’t even know her own baby’s name.

Somewhere far, far away in a giant stone castle, her baby was waking up. Her baby was crying, and someone else was feeding her. Iris or Drax or Tanith had probably picked out a name for her by now. Roxy didn’t know what it was. She would never know how it sounded when she called her own daughter.

Her baby was going to grow up. She would learn to walk. She would learn to talk and say her first words. She would get older, and she would look in the mirror, and she would never, ever know what her mother’s face looked like. She would only know Roxy from old stories. She might even grow up thinking her mother didn’t fight hard enough to come back to her.

The thought of her baby feeling abandoned felt like a sharp knife twisting right in Roxy’s stomach.

A hot tear fell down Roxy’s cheek and hit her knee.

But then, the crying stopped.

The deep, heavy sadness inside her started to change. It didn’t turn into loud anger or a panic attack. It turned into something much colder, much quieter, and much more dangerous.

It turned into a dark resolve.

A mother’s love does not just give up and fade away because a door gets locked. If the gods wouldn’t listen to her quiet thoughts, then she was going to have to make them listen.

If normal talking didn’t work, she was going to have to do something so loud and so crazy that the universe would have no choice but to pay attention to her. She needed to break the rules, too.

Roxy slowly lifted her head from her knees. She put her hands flat on the soft carpet and pushed herself up to her feet. Her legs were a little shaky from sitting so long, but she stood up straight.

She turned her head and looked across the dark room.

Right in front of her was the massive, floor-to-ceiling glass window. Beyond the thick glass, the city lights sparkled far, far below. They were hundreds of feet up in the air, higher than almost every other building around them.

The cars on the street down there looked like tiny little bugs moving in the dark.

She could just jump and everything would be over.

She stared at the thick glass. Her green eyes were no longer wild or filled with tears. They were completely cold, steady, and blank.

A terrifying, extreme idea slowly started to form in her mind.