"I hope... you can bring me good luck, Mr. Crow."
Bella's Amber eyes curved gently as she spoke softly to Corax in the darkness below.
Her voice held a childlike, expectant brightness, as though she were making a birthday wish.
"Tomorrow," she paused, a mysterious, slightly smug smile appearing on her face, "I'll be able to bring you something tastier, Mr. Crow. Wait for me."
With that, she waved at Corax. Before he could react and ask her anything, her small figure nimbly slipped back through the opening.
Silence returned to the cell, leaving only Corax, the rough lump of chemical dough still warm in his hand, and the faintest lingering trace of Bella's scent in the air—a mixture of dust and something he could not describe.
Yet the instant Bella vanished, a fierce, inexplicable unease coiled around Corax's heart like an icy vine.
That unease came from a deeper, more ominous premonition.
It was not the first time he had felt it during his long, agonizing imprisonment.
Often, before he was dragged away for some particularly cruel experiment, or when the corridor lights flickered inexplicably, signaling a gap during the changing of the guards, this warning born of instinct would faintly stir.
He did not know what Bella was going to do, nor what "something tastier" meant.
But deep within him, the warning mechanism sharpened to an extraordinary, almost neurotic sensitivity by countless dissections and observations kept insistently pricking him with a silent warning: something was going to happen. Something bad.
He wanted to leave.
Right now.
Immediately.
The thought battered wildly against his chest like the roar of a caged beast.
He wanted to use these hands, this thin body that nevertheless harbored inhuman strength, to tear through the thick alloy walls, smash the locked cell door, and