8. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Julianna
I t begins in blackout. My consciousness returns from some pitch void, like someone’s dropped me headfirst into a vat of cheap tequila and I’m clawing my way out with nothing but regret and bile.
The first thing I notice is pain, which is good, because it means I’m alive.
Then I notice cold, which is less good, because wherever I am, it’s the kind of cold that gets inside your bones and makes them ache.
My mouth tastes like battery acid and regret.
I try to roll onto my side, to spit, but my arms don’t answer.
There’s a brief, ugly moment where I wonder if Creed did what I think he did, and I try to wiggle my fingers.
Good news: they work. Bad news: they don’t go anywhere.
There’s a click and a sudden, sharp pressure around my wrists, metal, not plastic. Cuffs.
So. Not dead. Not paralyzed. Just… neatly packaged.
That motherfucker…
I open my eyes, slowly. The room is dark, but not entirely.
There’s a single bulb overhead, dangling on a cord so thin I could snap it if I could get within three feet.
It throws shadows across four concrete walls, no windows, not even the charade of a curtain.
There’s a bed, which is what I’m on, or rather, what I’m chained to.
Industrial, welded steel, hospital-issue mattress, no sheets, just a thin blue blanket that’s more of a fucking joke than anything else.
The air smells like bleach and rust and something earthy, like wet rocks. I run through all of this in the first three seconds, because my brain doesn’t do idle. It’s already working the problem.
My hands are cuffed to a chain attached to a ring on the wall, which is welded from the same steel as the frame.
I try to arch my back and slip my hands free, but he did a fan-fucking-tasic job of securing me tight enough that I can’t slip it without breaking my thumb.
At least the chain is long enough I can get up and move around.
Oh… he’s good. Really fucking good…
I try again, pulling at the cuff, but clearly it’s not meant to be. Not without a hacksaw, or at the very least, a lack of pain receptors.
At the far end of the room is what passes for a bathroom: a metal bucket, and a basin with a single, sweat-stained towel folded next to it. There is no faucet, just a plastic water bottle upended into the basin. I’m not sure whether to be impressed or insulted.
For a while, I just breathe. Let the panic creep up, hit maximum volume, then settle into a low, manageable hum in the base of my skull.
I inventory everything: wrists (intact), ankles (also intact), internal organs (present and accounted for, though my stomach is staging a protest), vision (sharp), hearing (nothing but the faint buzz of the bulb and my own heart, thumping like a minor league pitcher with something to prove).
I test the cuffs again, slow and methodical.
They’re police-issue, tight enough that there’s no give, but not so tight as to cut off circulation.
I flex my hands, rock my wrists in tiny increments.
The skin pinches, but doesn’t tear. I could probably dislocate my thumb to try and slip free, but I’ll save that for when I really need it.
For now, it’s recon. Besides, I only enjoy inflicting pain. Not giving it to myself.
I scan the bed, looking for anything that might help. No loose springs, no hidden shiv under the mattress. I make a mental note that if I need to hang myself, at least this piss poor blanket could do the job.
Next, the room. The walls are smooth concrete, painted that institutional gray that gives you PTSD just from looking at it.
The door is metal, heavy, no visible handle on my side, which means it’s not meant to open from here.
No hinges exposed. No screws I could dig out with my teeth.
I catalogue every square inch, looking for cracks or seams or anything to exploit.
There’s a vent, high in the wall, maybe big enough to fit me if I really sucked in. I calculate the odds of getting up there, and then remember the cuffs. So, zero. If Creed put me here, he’s not underestimating me. That’s almost flattering.
I test my voice. “Hello?” The word ricochets around the room, bouncing off concrete and coming back twice as empty. I try louder. “HEY!”
Silence.
I scream, just to see if I can. It’s a full-throated, primal thing, like an animal that knows it’s trapped and wants the whole jungle to hear. The echo is immense, but when it dies, there’s nothing.
Honestly, letting that out made me feel better.
I scream again, hoping he can hear me. Hoping the noise bothers him and I find it so hilarious, a giggle bursts out of my chest. God, I am so fucked . Fuck him. Fuck Creed. If he wanted me silent, he’d have cut out my tongue.
That thought gives me pause. Would he? Do I know?
I replay the last thing I remember: Creed in my kitchen, the mug of tea, the way he watched me drink it.
The way I thought I was so fucking clever, playing along, keeping up the pretense of normalcy even as my brain went full DEFCON.
But I missed the obvious. Never let your stalker get you drunk or drugged.
Rookie move, Dr. Whitmore. First lesson in every Lifetime movie.
My feet are cold. I pull them under the blanket, toes curling against the rough fabric.
The headache is fading, replaced by a low, thrumming hunger.
I wonder how long I’ve been out. Hours? A day?
No way to know. The bulb doesn’t flicker, so there’s no sense of time passing. It could be midnight. It could be noon.
My bladder is full, but not urgent. Not urgent enough to go in a metal bucket, at least.
I roll my head to the side, take another look at the “bathroom.” The bucket is empty, but clean, so either I’m his first guest or he’s very thorough. I bet on the latter.
Another laugh escapes me. “You could have just asked me out, asshole.” My voice is hoarse, but it holds.
I guess he did… dickhead doesn’t deal with rejection very well, now does he.
I try to remember every detail of Creed’s face, his hands, the way he moved in my apartment.
There’s a calculation to him, a precision that reminds me of surgeons I work with.
The best ones never had to raise their voices.
They just made you want to obey. That’s Creed.
He’s not a brute, not a sadist. He’s something worse. He’s a man with a plan.
The room is silent. I listen for footsteps, for the scrape of a lock, but nothing comes.
The only sound is the soft hiss of my own breathing and the occasional pop from the bulb.
For a moment, I feel the edge of panic again, what if no one comes?
What if he just leaves me here, a question mark in a concrete box?
I shove the thought down. That’s not Creed’s style.
He wants a show. He wants me to know he’s watching.
I test my voice again, louder this time. “CREED! Come on, you cowardly motherfucker. If you’re going to kidnap me, at least have the decency to talk to me, you fucking Muppet.” Nothing. Not even an echo. “I know you can hear me,” I say, softer, almost to myself. “I know you’re watching.”
Still nothing.
I let my head fall back onto the thin pillow.
The bulb flickers once, briefly. For a second, the shadows on the wall shift, and I see my own profile, drawn in harsh lines against the concrete.
It looks nothing like me. I imagine what Creed sees when he looks at me.
Not the surgeon, not the runner-up for Chief of Cardio, not the perfect resume or the clean apartment.
He sees a challenge. Something to be solved.
The thought sends a shiver down my spine. Not fear, exactly, but something close.
I close my eyes, try to rest, but the bed is too hard, the light too bright, and my mind too loud. I count backwards from a hundred, focusing on the numbers, willing myself not to break. At seventy-two, I realize I’m smiling. This isn’t the worst day of my life, not by a long shot.
I’ve been here before, in a way. Not the cuffs, not the basement, but the feeling.
The certainty that everything will be decided in the next few hours.
That everything I am is on the line. I think about the first time I held a beating heart in my hands, the way it pulsed against my glove, the raw, terrifying intimacy of it. This isn’t so different.
I open my eyes, fix them on the bulb, and wait.
He’ll come. He always does.
And when he does, I’ll be ready.
Time doesn't pass down here. It calcifies. It grows in the walls and under your nails until everything feels slow and sticky and forever. It could have been hours, or minutes, all I know is that I can’t keep track of my thoughts anymore.
For a while, I keep my shit together. I run the mental checklist: pulse, breath, range of motion, everything from the top of my scalp to the balls of my feet.
I rotate my wrists, flex my biceps, test the cuffs for even a millimeter of play.
There isn’t any, but it gives me something to do.
I hum a song, then another, just to see how long it takes before I start to hate the sound of my own voice. It’s faster than you’d think.
I try to sleep, but the bed is engineered for discomfort, too short, too narrow, too hard to allow for dreams. Every time I doze, the cuffs bite in, or my neck kinks, or my own thoughts jerk me awake.
I get up once, shuffling the length of the chain to the bucket in the corner.
I piss with the dignity of a rabid raccoon and return to bed, feeling less like a person and more like a problem in a logic puzzle.
At some point, my composure cracks. I don’t see it coming.
One minute I’m mapping the dimensions of the room in my head, calculating the cubic volume and the probable airflow, and the next I’m yanking on the cuffs with everything I have, screaming until my throat feels like hamburger.
It’s an ugly, animal sound, the kind I used to hear from patients coming out of anesthesia in the middle of a failed surgery. I scream anyway.
I keep at it until my wrists go numb, the skin turning slick and red. I taste iron in my mouth, bit my own lip, probably, or maybe a capillary in my throat just gave up. I don’t care. I want to leave evidence, even if it’s only for myself.
When the rage fades, I crash. I lie back on the bed, panting, wrists throbbing, head full of static. I want to cry, but I don’t. Not yet. Instead, I drift sideways, not quite awake, not quite asleep, replaying every step that got me here.
It goes like this:
1. Creed in my kitchen, making eggs like it’s his fucking house.
2. The tea, chamomile, nothing suspicious except for the fact that he offered it. I should have seen the powder, the slip in his hand, the infinitesimal twitch of his left thumb as he stirred the cup.
3. The way my eyelids started to glue shut, the slow-motion collapse. The weightless feeling in my limbs as he caught me, carried me. How I wanted to fight but couldn’t, how I hated him for being right.
4. The cold of the car, the smell of the upholstery, the darkness when the doors closed and the world fell away.
I replay it over and over, searching for a moment where I could have changed the outcome. I can’t find one. Maybe that’s the point.
I spend the next forever alternating between angry and analytical.
My wrists bleed a little, but the cuffs are well-designed: they pinch but don’t cut the artery.
It’s almost considerate. I try to get creative, bracing my legs against the headboard and leveraging my body weight, using the blanket as a friction buffer, twisting and turning every possible way.
It hurts like a bitch, but the pain keeps me alert.
I file every sensation away. I know that in enough time, I’ll build up calluses, maybe even loosen the ligaments.
I don’t know how long I have, but I know how long it takes to break a body, and this isn’t it yet.
I scream for Creed every once in a while.
Sometimes I use his name. Sometimes I just let the sound out, hoping he’s listening on the other side of the door, hoping it makes him uncomfortable.
I picture him standing in a hallway, arms folded, counting the seconds until I wear myself out.
Maybe he’s making notes, tracking my emotional state, mapping the stages of my breakdown like he’s doing a science project.
I hope he’s bored to tears.
In my quieter moments, I take stock of the room.
There are fourteen bolts holding the bed to the floor, two in each leg and six more anchoring the frame against the wall.
The welds are clean, but one leg has a faint discoloration near the base, a flaw, maybe, or a sign of a repair job. Maybe old blood.
I alternate between fury and focus. Sometimes I want to set the place on fire. Sometimes I want to sink into the mattress and disappear. Mostly I just want to win.
At one point, I laugh so hard I nearly choke.
It hits me how pathetic it is, sitting here in a concrete hole, bleeding from my own stupidity, waiting for a man who thinks kidnapping is a love language.
I want to hate him. I try, but all I get is a weird, electric thrill in my gut, the same one I get before a big surgery, when the odds are against me and every move matters.
It doesn’t help that I do find this somewhat romantic. A man… willing to kidnap me because I rejected him? How cute.
He won’t kill me. Of that, I’m sure. But he might try break me down until I can’t recognize love and trauma. He seems the type.
Little does he know that I can inflict a world of pain, myself.
And then I hear it.
Footsteps, somewhere beyond the door. Deliberate. Heavy. Not the frantic shuffle of someone in a hurry, but the measured, patient stride of a man who knows exactly how long each step will take. Creed .
My body reacts before my mind does. Heart rate up, blood pressure spiking, adrenaline punching through the fog of fatigue. I sit up straighter on the bed, roll my shoulders, tilt my chin up. My hands clench and unclench around the chain, ignoring the flare of pain.
The footsteps grow louder, closer, then stop just outside. The silence after is immense, like the world inhaled and forgot to exhale.
I fix my eyes on the door. I don’t blink.
Bring it, you fuck.
I'm ready.