Chapter 1
SOPHIA
Panic is not tidy.
It claws. It stammers. It tastes like copper.
Just breathe. In for four—out for eight. A trick from the yoga videos on my laptop, the ones I ran while the fake fireplace flickered on the TV. Cinnamon candles. A mug of hot chocolate steaming on a snowflake coaster.
I try to see it, the picture frames on the bookshelves, the cheap fairy lights that make the apartment glow, the gentle hum of the refrigerator that lulls me to sleep. Every detail is sharp, until the panic claws back in.
I swallow it down with another breath—in for four, out for eight—but my heartbeat is a tattoo gun against my neck. I can hear it, even through the fog of fear, drumming a frantic tempo in my ears.
Tonight was supposed to be like any other night. Me running to the store in boots, a coat over my PJs because I always forget something. Sugar, tape, milk, whatever. Same path. Same steps. Familiar. Safe.
Until it wasn’t.
A gloved hand clamped over my mouth. Another arm locked my waist. My feet left the ground and the world split into two things—a sharp scream that wanted out, and a pressure against my throat that silenced it.
The vehicle growls, and I’m half-sprawled on the middle bench, no seatbelt, shoulder sliding on cold leather. The blindfold pins me in black. Turns throw me sideways, fear tearing my insides apart.
The smell hits next. Gasoline and fresh pine—sharp, wrong. Like a forest fire. It makes my stomach churn.
My wrists are tied in front of me, something tight and merciless biting into flesh. Each rut in the road grinds it deeper. My fingers tingle, go numb—then flare like live wires.
“Please,” I whisper and wince at my own voice. Small. Cracked around the edges. The car swallows it, engine steady, tires whispering over snow. “You’ve made a mistake. I don’t—”
“No mistake.”
Two words, and my skin tightens as if the air dropped ten degrees. His voice is deep and unbothered. It vibrates through the seat into my bones like a tuning fork that’s found its note.
My mind skitters. I grab at explanations that make this not what it is. Maybe I saw something I shouldn’t have. Maybe he’s confusing me with someone else. Maybe this is ransom.
The ugly shape of that word makes bile rise in my throat. Ransom would require family with money. My mother’s dead, and my dad can’t even remember my name. I have a job that pays rent and leaves me enough for coffee and a secondhand coat. If he wants money, he chose wrong.
“What do you want?” It comes out more defiant than I feel, and the tiniest sliver of relief threads through the terror.
Good. Stay steady. Keep talking. People are less likely to kill you if they think of you as a person.
Something I read once, a self-defense blog at three a.m. when I couldn’t sleep.
He doesn’t answer.
The car accelerates, a smooth surge that presses me back, then eases. Whoever’s behind the wheel knows how to drive in winter when sleet reforms the road to glass. The turns grow less frequent. Fewer stops. The road noise changes—less hiss, more crunch.
Oh my God, where is he taking me?
My breathing stutters, but I fight it, force my lungs to cooperate. My wrists throb, so I twist, test the knot, but it doesn’t budge; it only tightens more. He bound me like he’s done it before. Many times.
“Who are you?” Maybe if I can put a name to him, he’ll become a person instead of a monolith in the dark. Because if he says a name, I can remember it, repeat it, survive it.
“Stay quiet,” he bites out, his voice penetrating my spine like a butcher’s knife, but desperation and fear make me reckless.
“Why are you doing this?”
The car stops hard, a clean, decisive brake that throws me forward.
My face and bound hands slam into the back of the front seat and pain flares.
Before I can cry out, his fist hooks in the rope at my wrists and yanks me close.
The movement is precise, completely controlled.
He doesn’t wrench my arms or hurt me, just anchors me in place.
Warmth leans in. His cheek touching mine, his breath against my ear.
“I said. Stay. Quiet.”
If his voice were a weapon, I’d already be dead.
I go very still as he holds me there a heartbeat longer, then lets go. The door creaks open and cold floods in, a slap of air that smells like pine and snow and damp earth, like a grave split open. Footsteps crunch, and the back door gives way with a hollow crack.
“No, please.” I jerk and twist, panic sharp as broken glass, but he grabs my ankles and drags me from the car like I weigh nothing.
Gloved hands slide under my arms and haul me up.
“Don’t hurt me.” The plea is automatic and useless. The night eats it.
He swings me out. My boots skid on packed snow and the wind claws under my coat, icing into the thin pajama sweater. But my skin burns with panic. My breath fogs wet through the blindfold and dampens it, the fabric sticking.
There’s a height to his presence behind me, a density. People take up space differently when they know they’re dangerous. The air around them tightens, shrinks, charged with a latent violence.
Fingers grip my elbow and guide me, not urgently but without room for refusal.
I stumble, catch myself. Gravel gives to wood beneath my boots, and he pauses. A key scrapes in a lock. A latch throws. The door swings.
“Please…”
Heat rolls out and touches my frozen cheeks, laced with something—antiseptic? No. Concrete and paint, the raw scent of a place not yet lived in.
The step up is higher than I expect. My boot snags the threshold and I lurch forward. His hand tightens on my arm and steadies me before I pitch onto my face.
“Careful.” One word. Neither warning nor kindness.
Inside, the heat is immediate, seamless—no draft, no delay, and the door thumps shut somewhere behind me. The silence is instant, too perfect to be natural, like it’s engineered. Weighted like stone.
He doesn’t speak as he pulls me farther in. His boots strike the floor with a dead sound, the kind that swallows noise instead of making it.
“Please,” I say again and flinch at the way it sounds. I hate begging. I hate it more because it rises out of me so easily. “Whatever you think I did, I didn’t.”
He doesn’t answer, and that only forces more panic into my pulse.
My teeth clatter with the violence of my shiver, and my knees buckle, boneless, adrenaline burning out into freefall. “Please don’t hurt me.”
There’s this sound he makes, almost like a growl, but isn’t. Like my plea offended him somehow.
He steadies me with a hand at the small of my back and leaves heat there, but it doesn’t stop me from shaking.
“Where are you taking me?”
More agonizing silence.
The fibers binding my wrists slice deeper with every small movement. My head’s jerking from left to right, the darkness soaking my tears as I try to stay calm even though every breath takes heart-stopping effort.
He turns me, and the backs of my knees hit something, forcing me down.
I collapse onto what feels like a mattress—a bed—and I shudder at the implications.
The blindfold cuts out the world so completely that my other senses feel loud, absurdly vivid.
The scrape of his shoes, the soft thud of a bag being set down, the whisper of fabric when he moves.
“Please,” I say, softer. “I can’t—” I tilt my face toward him though I can’t see. “I can’t breathe with this on.”
There’s a beat of silence, and I can feel his gaze like pressure.
Surprisingly, fingers touch the blindfold, brushing my hair away, and loosen it.
He doesn’t rush. He doesn’t fumble. He tugs once, and then another when the fabric loosens and the blindfold is gone, snatched away, leaving me lightheaded, the world too bright, too sudden.
The room swims into focus in sharp planes. Glass walls swallowed by night and framed in steel, snow pressed against the panes like a living mural. A fireplace, unlit, cut into black stone, and beside it, a single birch log arrangement leans artfully against the wall—decorative, not meant to burn.
My eyes find him last.
He stands a few feet away, a shadow carved out of the dim.
The hood is up, draping his head in black, a soft shroud that swallows light.
A buff stretches across the lower half of his face, hiding his mouth, leaving only his eyes visible—blue and burning, sharp enough to cut through the gloom.
He’s tall, yes, but it’s more than height.
It’s the way space bends around him, as if the room tilts slightly to make room for him.
The hoodie is layered under a black leather jacket, shoulders broad enough to strain the seams. Long legs under black denim are planted firmly, weight distributed with the ease of someone trained to fight.
Nothing about him is accidental—every line of him is measured, controlled, built for violence.
His hands are covered with black gloves that he peels off one finger at a time with a patience that feels obscene.
He watches me take him in. Unhurried. Like he wants me to see exactly what I’m up against before he says a single word.
My mouth is dry, and I realize I’m shaking visibly, a fine tremor running through my arms and shoulders, my legs clamped together to keep them from bouncing.
I’m aware suddenly of my clothes in a way that feels naked—sweater with stupid tiny wreaths, flannel pajama pants with candy canes that felt cute in my apartment and feel childish here.
He slides the gloves into his jacket pocket, then crouches and pulls a knife from an ankle sheath. The blade glints, and I flinch so hard the bed squeaks.
“No, no, no.” My voice quivers, tears prickling. “Please don’t hurt me.”