"It was just a dog."
"Did you really think he was your twin brother?"
"Lee Cheng Xin is an artificial, created by me."
Alisa's blood had run cold in her veins, so frigid that her entire body had turned to ice. Once they'd pulled her from the room, she felt a wave of strange emptiness wash over her---true blank stone, not the emotionless mask she had been hiding behind all her life. Her dog was dead. Her twin was fake. Red was trapped with a monster. She was good as dead.
Life was a gift that kept on giving, except the gift box was filled with spiders and the spiders multiplied every time she tried to pull the ribbon open.
Alisa stopped struggling, stopped crying, stopped fighting. She lay limp as a rag doll as she realised that she was truly alone. Her world had fallen apart, any last shreds of hope ripped from her and ground into the soil. The barrel of the rifle was cold against her neck, as cold as her heart. The icy fist that had squeezed around it earlier was back with a vengeance, strangling the life out of her.
It was cold when her clothes were stripped off her helpless body. It was cold when she was thrown to the ground and punched, slapped, hit. It was cold when the men did as they wished with her.
It was cold when Alisa Lee finally gave up.