Bound by Wretched Thorns

1. In the Dark

Chapter one

In the Dark

Iwoke to darkness and the smell of old wood.

For a long moment, I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. My body felt wrong, heavy and disconnected, like someone had filled my veins with wet sand. My head throbbed in slow, nauseating waves, and when I tried to open my eyes, the lids scraped like sandpaper.

Where am I?

The thought surfaced sluggishly, fighting through a fog that tasted chemical and sweet. Chloroform. The word drifted up from somewhere through the fog in my mind. Is this what chloroform tastes like? Does chloroform have a taste?

I made myself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way Tara had taught me during those early panic attacks after I’d left Marcus. Ground yourself. Name what you know.

I was lying on something soft. A bed, maybe, or a thick mattress. The surface beneath my cheek was smooth, cool, and expensive. High thread-count sheets. My wrists burned, a dull sting that sharpened when I tried to move my arms.

Bound. I was bound.

The fog cleared a little more, and with it came the first real spike of fear.

I forced my eyes open.

Darkness. Not the darkness of a room with the lights off, but something denser, more complete. No streetlight glow seeped through curtains. No LED standby lights from electronics. No ambient light at all. Just black, thick and absolute, pressing against my eyes like velvet.

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Think.

I made myself focus on what I could sense.

The air was cool and still, carrying that smell of old wood I’d noticed first. Cedar, maybe, or cypress.

Something Southern and antique. Beneath it, fainter: beeswax polish, dust, and a trace of something else.

Something that made the back of my neck prickle.

A wrongness I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

As my eyes adjusted, shapes emerged from the darkness. Walls with elaborate wainscoting, I think, in dark wood, floor to ceiling. A floor of the same wood, deeply stained and polished to a dull gleam. A ceiling, also the same dark wood, with heavy exposed beams running the length of it.

No windows.

I sat up slowly, fighting dizziness, and the room swam around me.

My wrists were crossed in front of me, bound with something that caught the faint light.

Rope, but not ordinary rope. Silver threads wove through the fibers, glinting like trapped moonlight, and where they touched my skin, they burned.

Not burned like fire. Burned like ice. Like frostbite spreading slowly inward.

I tried to take a closer look. Is this actually silver?

I knew in Hollywood lore, silver hurts werewolves.

But I’m not a wolf. So why does it hurt me?

The question lingered, unanswered, as I took in the rest of the room.

A dresser against one wall, dark wood like everything else.

An armoire in the corner. The bed I was lying on, a massive four-poster thing that looked like it belonged in a museum.

One door, heavy and reinforced, with no handle on this side.

No windows. No clock. No way to tell if it was day or night, or how long I’d been here.

The last thing I remembered—

Callum. The bathroom. Marcus.

It hit me like a physical blow; the memories crashing back in fragments.

Callum, bound and bloody on the floor, those burning sigils wrapped around his throat.

Marcus’s smile, familiar and wrong, his eyes that sick gray-green I’d never seen before.

The cloth pressed to my face, the chemical sweetness flooding my lungs.

“That’s my girl. You’ve led me on quite a chase, you know.”

I was going to be sick.

I lurched to the edge of the bed, my bound hands making me clumsy, and dry-heaved onto the polished floor. Nothing came up. My stomach was empty, which meant I’d been here long enough to process whatever food had been in my system.

Half a day, at least. Maybe longer.

Callum.

I could still hear his howl, anguished and furious, echoing off the bathroom tiles as Marcus lifted me. Still see the way he’d fought against those burning symbols, the skin of his throat blistering where they touched.

Was he alive? Is he—

I couldn’t think about that. If I thought about it, I would fall apart, and I couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not here. Not now.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood. The room tilted dangerously, and I grabbed the bedpost to steady myself. The silver-threaded rope bit deeper into my wrists, and I hissed through my teeth.

One thing at a time. That’s how you survive.

I’d learned that lesson from Marcus, actually.

During the bad years, when I was still trying to make the relationship work, still telling myself that if I just tried harder, loved better, understood more, he would stop being cruel.

I’d learned to shrink my world down to the next minute, the next breath, the next small task that needed doing.

The trick was to make the world small enough to carry.

A door. A hinge. The weight of my hands in my lap.

I had gotten good at that once, good enough that three years had gone by while I practiced it, and the practice came back to me now without being asked, the way your fingers remember a song you swore you had forgotten.

I made a list of everything I could see or touch.

I named the dark wood. I named the four posts of the bed, the corners of the room, the stale air and the burn at my wrists.

Naming a thing made it mine instead of his, and what was mine was the only ground I had to stand on.

I thought I was done with just surviving. I thought I’d finally found something better.

Apparently not.

I made my way to the door, each step careful and deliberate. The floor was solid beneath my feet, no creaks or give. Old construction, well-maintained. The kind of house that had been built to last for generations.

The door had no handle on this side, but it did have hinges. Heavy iron, set deep into the wood. I couldn’t see any light seeping around the edges, which meant either it was night outside or there were no windows in whatever space lay beyond.

I pressed my ear to the wood and listened.

“Hello?” My voice came out rusty, barely louder than a whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Is anyone there?”

The silence swallowed my words without a ripple.

I stepped back, my bound hands trembling. Think, Serena. What do you have? What can you use?

The rope around my wrists was too tight to slip, and the silver threads made it impossible to work at the knots without burning myself worse. I needed something to cut it with. A nail, a piece of broken glass, anything with an edge.

I searched the room systematically, my fingers clumsy in the darkness. The dresser drawers were empty. The armoire held nothing but dust and the ghost-smell of old lavender. The bed frame was solid wood, no loose screws or exposed metal.

Someone had prepared this room for a prisoner. Someone who knew what they were doing.

That was the detail that frightened me worst, worse than the dark, worse than the burn at my wrists.

Not that I had been taken. Taken, I could almost understand; I had been bracing for some version of taken since the day I changed my locks.

What I could not understand was the care: the emptied drawers, the handle removed from my side of the door, the bed bolted to a frame that did not give.

Someone had stood in this room before me, calm and unhurried, and thought through every small way a desperate woman might try to save herself, and closed each one.

Patience like that does not come from a man in a hurry, nor a novice.

It comes from a man who has done this before and expects to do it again.

My fingers found the mattress, and I froze.

There was something wrong with the mattress.

I couldn’t explain it. The surface felt normal enough, smooth cotton over dense foam, but underneath, there was a hum. A vibration so low it was almost subsonic, resonating through my fingertips like a bass note too deep to hear.

And with it came that sense of wrongness I’d noticed before, stronger now. A feeling like standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark, knowing the drop was there even though I couldn’t see it.

What the hell is this place?

I took my hand off the mattress, and the hum went down out of my fingers and back into the wood, but the wrongness it left behind stayed in me a moment longer than it should have, a held note I could not stop hearing.

I have never been a woman who put much stock in things I could not touch.

Yet my body felt certain about something my mind had no label for, the way you know a stair is there in the dark and your foot reaches for it before you have decided anything at all.

Whatever sang under that mattress was older than this room.

I did not have a name for it. I had only the prickle along the back of my neck, and the prickle was not wrong about much.

I pulled my hands back and leaned against the bed frame, my heart hammering. The darkness pressed in from all sides, and I had the sudden, irrational certainty that something was watching me. Something in the corners of the room.

I was being ridiculous. There was nothing here but me, the dark, and whatever drugs were still working their way out of my system.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling. And when I looked at the far corner of the room, the shadows there seemed denser than they should be. Darker. Almost solid.

I closed my eyes and made myself breathe.

You’re alone. You’re scared. Your brain is making things up because it doesn’t have enough information. That’s all this is.

When I opened my eyes again, the shadows were just shadows.

But they seemed closer than before.

***

Time became meaningless in the dark.