The chill of the room seeped into Ye Eun's bones, a cold that had nothing to do with the outside weather. Her eyelids fluttered open, revealing a blinding white light that seemed to strip the world bare. A sharp, chemical tang pricked at her nostrils, and the metallic scent of something sterile clung to the air. Her head throbbed, a dull ache behind her eyes, and a wave of dizziness threatened to pull her back into the abyss.

She tried to move, to sit up, but a sudden, taut resistance held her fast. Panic flared, a cold dread blossoming in her chest as she realized her wrists and ankles were bound. The surface beneath her was hard, unyielding, and cold—a steel table, she surmised, the kind found in operating rooms or, God forbid, morgues.

"No," she whispered, the sound raw and desperate, barely audible in the vast silence. Her memory, hazy and fragmented, flickered to life. The party. The fight with her boyfriend. Walking home, shivering in the cool night air. And then… the car. A familiar car. A familiar face. A sudden, suffocating cloth pressed against her lips, and the world had dissolved into a swirling blackness.

Her gaze darted around the room, frantic. It was stark, minimalist, yet horrifyingly purposeful. Metal cabinets lined one wall, gleaming under the harsh lights. A trolley table, laden with surgical-looking instruments, stood nearby. In a corner, a small, vibrant bouquet of pink flowers seemed grotesquely out of place, a splash of life in this chamber of dread. Her eyes snagged on a large, metal door, locked, she assumed, by a keypad. It was all too clear: she wasn't in a hospital. She was in a cage. And the word that pounded relentlessly in her head was 'danger.'