Bane's Beginning

Prologue

Three Years Ago: Thea

Blood. The light metallic smell filled the air as my eyes shot open. I lay on the floor in my own pool of it, clutching my stomach. Tears started to prick at my eyes, but I couldn’t let this break me. I couldn’t let him win.

Most people would scream. They would cry. Call for help. Something. But for me, I had gotten used to the dull twinge of knowing no one would be coming to rescue me.

I heard a small creaking noise at the door. Willing myself to lean up, I looked around the Tuscan-style home doubling as my prison. The dry Italian air blew through an open window in the bedroom, leaving small traces of citric fruit behind, a smell I once adored but now haunted my dreams.

The home was beautiful, just like everything else in his life. Expensive murals covered the walls as candles gave only some of their secrets away. The paintings had become friends with me for many days when I had been locked away in my hell.

Who knew such a decorous home could be a prison?

Another creak broke the stillness inside of the room as fear rippled through me. Was he already back? I couldn’t take looking at his face again, not after what happened that night.

“Shh,” the voice of a man whispered as a shadow walked through the door. “I’m not here to hurt you, I’m here to help.”

This must have been a dream. Nearly every night these past three months I had begged to hear those words from someone, anyone.

“Help me,” I said with a shaky voice.

“Please.”

The shadow stepped closer, and the candlelight revealed a man in his mid-thirties. His unshaven beard and military-style clothing should have made him look intimidating, but it was the darkness in his eyes that truly unsettled me. Without it, I might have mistaken him for an ordinary businessman.

“My name is Flynn Carter, and I’m here to take you home,” the man said, crouching down beside me.

What was that noise? A thumping noise filled my ears. It was something I hadn’t heard in a long time. It wasn’t just the feeling of my heart beating again that seemed foreign.

It was the sense of something that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Hope.