Chapter 3
SOPHIA
The sound wakes me in a way that feels wrong, like my body knows before my mind does. A click. Soft. Precise. Metal sliding against metal.
My eyes open to the dim light of the room. My wrists ache where the rope cut into them, the antiseptic still on the floor where he left it. Untouched.
The phantom motion of the car still rocks through my body. Unfamiliar walls. Too clean, too empty. Not mine. And somewhere beyond that door, he waits.
My heart lurches, each beat pressing against my windpipe until I can barely swallow. I bolt upright, my gaze snapping to the door. That’s what it was—the click. He unlocked the door.
Every muscle in my body turns to stone as I strain to hear, waiting for the next sound. Footsteps. The door opening. For him to come in and remind me exactly how trapped I am. But nothing happens.
The quiet stretches. Adrenaline floods me anyway, like my body doesn’t know the difference between threat and absence. My breathing’s shallow, my chest tight, and I force myself to move before fear roots me to the mattress.
I slide off the bed, my bare feet barely making a sound on the floor. The room looks the same as it did last night—bare, arranged, like a stage set between performances. But the door stands out now, just enough to draw my eyes back to it. Unlocked.
Caution slows my steps as I move closer, half-expecting it to fly open the second I touch it. My fingertips meet the cold metal first, then my whole palm settles there. Still. Solid. A sharp inhale, a held breath—and I twist the handle, muscles tensing from my fingers all the way to my shoulders.
The door opens, and my heart skips a beat.
There’s no one on the other side. Just a hallway stretching into shadow. A draft of air sweeps over my skin, carrying the scent of something baking—cinnamon, butter, the caramelized edge of sugar. My stomach clenches, but adrenaline quickly smothers it.
I slide out, keeping close to the wall, my shoulder brushing it as I move. Every step feels too loud, every breath too fast. I expect him to appear at any moment, to materialize out of the shadows like he did last night, but the hallway stays empty.
At the top of the stairs, I stop. Below me, the front door comes into view, and it’s all I see, a vague sense of hope igniting somewhere in the pit of my stomach. Freedom is right there. So close.
I don’t think anymore. I run. My feet hit the stairs hard, fast, my grip sliding along the railing as I take them two at a time, my breath tearing out of me in sharp gasps. The front door looms closer, and when I reach it, I grab the handle and yank.
It doesn’t move.
“No—” The sound breaks out of me like a choked sob.
“Open. Goddammit!” Panic explodes, and I yank at the doorknob, but it doesn’t even rattle.
My vision blurs, tears spilling over, my hands shaking as I throw my weight into it again, my sweaty palms slipping on the doorknob.
“No, please!” My fingers fumble at the lock, useless, frantic. “Fuck!” I spin…and he’s there.
A sharp inhale scrapes my throat, and I move until my back hits the door. “Stay away from me.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. But he fills the space in front of me completely, tall and solid and impossible, blotting out the light behind him.
He isn’t wearing the hoodie now. Just dark clothes stretched over broad shoulders.
The black buff still covers the lower half of his face, but his eyes…
God. They lock onto mine, and the fear detonates.
I scream.
My body jerks as I bolt for the open space beside him. The wall scrapes my shoulder as I stumble past, my foot catching, and his hand shoots out, clamps around my arm, and rips me back.
“Get your hands off me!” My elbow connects with something solid. His grunt tells me it hurt. Good.
I wrench, fingernails raking cotton until threads catch under them.
I throw my weight backward, feeling my heel slam against what must be his shin bone—the impact jarring up through my ankle.
His hold loosens just enough for hope to flare, so I twist again, harder, my scream shredding my throat as I shove at his chest. “Let. Me. Go!”
He stumbles a half step, and I surge forward, desperate, but his arm snakes around my waist and drags me back against him. My back hits his chest. His breath is at my hair. The contact is so immediate, so close, panic fires up through my throat.
I slam my elbow back, but he shifts just in time, taking the blow to his shoulder instead of his face. Another scream, and I sink my nails into his arms. “Let go—”
“I told you not to run, Sophia.”
For a split second, my mind blanks, my name dislodged from me as if it belongs to him now…and I hate it.
“Fuck you!” I buck harder, my feet slipping on the floor as I kick and manage to turn, sweeping my arm back, balling my fist, ready to plow his face.
But he catches my wrist mid-swing, and in one fluid motion, he spins me around and secures my arm against my own chest, while his other arm bands around my waist like iron.
The hold is precise and terrifyingly practiced.
“Stop,” he demands, his voice low, controlled.
“I will never stop fighting you, I swear to God.”
“You’ll only waste your energy.”
I jerk against his hold. “I don’t care.”
“But I do.” His words come out quiet, nearly gentle, the kind of tone you’d use to soothe someone who doesn’t understand what’s inevitable yet.
For a heartbeat, he holds me there, taut and braced, like he’s waiting for another surge.
I can hear his breathing now, controlled but heavy against my ear, his attention fixed entirely on me.
Seconds trickle by, a relentless stretch of time that seems to last forever while my pulse hammers in my ears.
Finally, his grip loosens, and strong hands drop away abruptly, like touching me costs him something.
He steps back fast, putting distance between us, and I stumble forward, collapsing to my knees, every ounce of fight and energy drained.
“My boyfriend will look for me. Dean will notice I’m gone. He’ll call. He’ll—”
“He won’t.”
Ice clots my veins. “What does that mean?”
He offers me nothing, not a word while he just stands there staring at me.
“My work—”
“Received your resignation. Effective immediately.”
It hits me the way cold water hits. Not all at once but spreading, finding every crack, seeping into places I didn’t know were open.
His eyes hold mine, completely steady. “As far as anyone who knows you is concerned, Sophia Sinclair packed up her life and left in search of something the city couldn’t give her.”
I stare at him for a long moment. At the complete absence of apology in his expression, the flat certainty of a man who planned this the way he plans everything. Completely. Thoroughly. Without leaving anything to chance.
“No one is coming for me,” I murmur.
He doesn’t need to say anything; his silence confirms it.
The quiet presses in thickly, and something in me snaps under the weight of it. Fear twists into something hotter, sharper, furious at being seen like this—on my knees, shaking, begging—while he says nothing at all.
“What do you want from me?” I whisper between clenched teeth, but he gives me nothing but his silence. “What do you want from me, goddammit!”
My scream is raw and unhinged as I fall forward with my palms to the cold floor, but still he just continues to stand there, looking at me with cold eyes void of emotion, like he’s taunting me with a single glance.
His voice, when it finally comes, is low and steady. “I want you to eat.”
For a second, I don’t understand the words. They float between us, misplaced, meaningless, like they belong to some other conversation in some other universe where I’m not on my knees on the hardwood floor, staring up at a man whose face is hidden, who’s kidnapped me and now wants me to...eat?
Then it hits…and I start laughing. A loud, broken, hysterical sound that doesn’t feel like it comes from my body at all. I clamp a hand over my mouth like I can shove it back inside, but it keeps spilling through my fingers. High and wet and wrong.
“Eat?” I laugh harder, the sound tipping into something almost manic as tears stream down my face. “You kidnapped me. Locked me in this house, and now you want me to…eat?”
Laughter dissolves into a sob, and I suck in air too fast as I lean back on my knees, roughing my hair out of my face before pushing myself up on shaky legs. I’m barely able to stand upright.
“This might come as a surprise to you, but I’m not hungry.”
When he crosses his arms, his shoulders flex, a reminder he has the size advantage…by a lot.
“You’ll burn yourself out,” he says, almost clinically. “And then you’ll be weaker. Hungrier—”
“Screw you.”
“You don’t win this by fighting me, Sophia.”
“Don’t say my name like you know me,” I grit out, wrapping the last word around a hiss of breath.
He doesn’t react to that. Not to my tone, or the way my voice shakes around the anger. His silence is a statement, a declaration that he doesn’t care what I do and do not say…and that’s when I realize I’m not dealing with some impulsive kidnapper.
I’m facing something calculated, patient, and infinitely worse.
He tilts his head, just slightly, like he’s considering something that no longer concerns him. “You can fight,” he says. Flat. Unbothered. “You can scream. You can try doors until your hands fucking bleed.”
My stomach drops.
“There’s no way out of this house.”
I open my mouth—anger, panic, something—but he’s already turning away, done with the conversation. He walks past me without looking back, boots quiet against the floor, every step measured. At the doorway, he pauses.
“Breakfast is on the counter,” he says, like he’s reminding me to turn off a light. “Eat.” Then he’s gone.
A door closes somewhere deeper in the house, and I stand there for a long moment, crying, shaking, the silence pressing in again.
Swallowing hard, I wipe my nose against my sleeve, my body folding in on itself.
I’ve never experienced fear like this, so tangible and real it seeps into every cell, every nerve fiber, making me quiver.
I glance at the front door, untouched as if it hasn’t just been a battle to get to it, to run.
My ankle throbs where I kicked his shin, and I gingerly lean to touch that spot.
That’s when the sugary butter scent hits me again, sharper this time, and despite everything, caught between revulsion and the bizarre inclination to comply, I find myself heading for the kitchen.
Each step toward it feels like a concession, like I’m giving him something just by going where he told me to.
The space opens up softly, not grand or imposing—just… right.
Sunlight spills in through the floor to ceiling window, warming the solid wood counters, the grain worn smooth in places like hands have already learned them. The kind of surface you knead dough on and wipe clean with the edge of your palm.
A vintage kettle sits on the stove, enamel cream with a soft curve to its spout. Open shelves line the wall, holding glass jars of tea and sugar, simple and unlabeled because they don’t need to be.
Everything here is clean, well-cared-for, lived-in rather than staged. Not like the room I was locked in. This isn’t a kitchen someone decorated for show. It’s a kitchen someone knows, and something about it resonates in me, as if I’d sketched this exact space in a dream I can’t quite remember.
Under a glass dome—the kind that would sit atop a cake stand in some quaint bakery window—I spot them. My chest constricts. The buttery, spiced scent suddenly has a source, apple cinnamon muffins, their tops cracked and glistening with sugar.
My favorite.
For a flicker of a second, the thought slips in uninvited, ‘He knows me.’ It’s so quiet it barely registers, like a trick of the light or a memory reaching for the wrong place.
The idea brushes against something tender in my chest, but it’s impossible.
He can’t know me. This is coincidence. Manipulation.
A set dressed to make me feel small and foolish for wanting it.
The scent pulls me forward before I decide to move. It’s nostalgic, a memory of Sunday mornings in my mother’s kitchen, her hands dusted with flour, mine sticky with sugar. I miss her.
The glass dome looks delicate, almost pretty, the muffins arranged beneath it like an offering. Like care. Like something placed here on purpose. Meant to blur the line between kindness and captivity.
Something I won’t fall for.
A surge of heat rises up my spine, and before I can stop myself, I sweep my arm across the counter.
The glass dome flies, weightless for a heartbeat, then crashes to the floor and explodes, the sound loud and violent in the quiet.
Shards scatter, with the pastries ruined on impact, their warmth bleeding out onto the hardwood floor.
I don’t move right away. I just stand there, chest heaving, staring at the mess like my body is waiting for permission to react.
Cinnamon still clings to the air, sweet and wrong, curling into my lungs no matter how shallow I try to breathe.
Glass crunches under my bare foot when I shift, the sting sharp enough to remind me I’m still real, still here. Still trapped.
I expect something to happen next. A door.
A voice. Consequences. Instead, there’s only the quiet and the smell and the slow, sick realization that breaking something didn’t make me feel better.
It didn’t make me feel stronger. It didn’t even make me feel safer.
Broken glass and ruined muffins are not a victory… it’s just terror with nowhere to run.