1. In the Dark #2
I tried to track it at first. Counting seconds, estimating minutes, attempting to distinguish between stretches of darkness that might be hours and those that might be moments.
But the room offered no reference points.
No light changes. No sound from outside.
No way to tell if the sun was rising, setting, or existed at all.
I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. Every time I started to drift, my mind would jerk me back with images of Callum bleeding on the floor, of Marcus’s wrong-colored eyes, of that cloth descending toward my face.
So I waited. And I watched the shadows.
Waiting was something I knew how to do. I had waited out his moods for three years, learned the exact drop in the air that came before a bad night, learned to read a slammed cabinet the way a farmer reads a sky going dark.
I put that same animal patience to work now.
I learned the room by inches. The cool seam of air that slid under the door and told me there was a hall on the other side of it.
The grain in the silence, a faint old hum I could not place and did not yet have the sense to be afraid of.
The dark did not lift, so I quit waiting for it to lift and started living inside it, the way a person learns to live inside any small and terrible place when they are made to stay there long enough.
They were definitely moving now. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but I could track them if I focused. The darkness in the corners would shift, expand, and contract. Like something breathing.
I had read somewhere that a brain starved of light will build a world out of whatever it has on hand.
Faces in the grain of the dark. Movement where there is none.
I told myself that was all this was, my mind playing tricks, providing me company in the dark.
But the company my mind handed me did not behave the way an invention should.
An invention does not go still when you turn and look at it.
An invention does not seem, very faintly, to be waiting for you to look away so it can come a little closer, and then wait patiently and unhurried when you refuse to, as if it has all the time in the world and knows that you do not.
I told myself it was my eyes playing tricks. Told myself that the brain hallucinates in sensory deprivation, that this was normal, expected, nothing to fear.
But some part of me didn’t believe it. Some part of me recognized what the shadows were doing, felt an answering pull in my chest. Like calling to like.
I was still trying to make sense of that feeling when the lock turned.
I scrambled back on the bed, my heart slamming against my ribs. The door swung open, and light spilled in. Not much, just a dim glow from somewhere beyond, but after all that darkness it was blinding.
A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. Tall. Familiar.
Marcus.
He stepped inside, and the door closed behind him. The lock clicked back into place. I heard him moving, heard the scratch of a match, and then warm yellow light bloomed from a candle on the dresser. Then another. Then a third.
In the candlelight, he looked different.
It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.
His skin had always been pale, but now it seemed to glow faintly from within, luminous and strange.
The circles under his eyes were gone. The faint lines around his mouth had smoothed out.
He looked younger, healthier, more vital than I’d ever seen him.
And his eyes—
His eyes had always been blue. A clear, cold blue that I’d once found striking. But now they were something else. The blue had faded to a sickly gray-green, like mold growing on old food. Like something rotting in standing water.
“Good evening, sweetheart.” His voice was the same. Warm, cultured, with that faint southern inflection that I’d once found charming. “Did you sleep well?”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My throat had closed up, every survival instinct I possessed screaming at me to run, to fight, to do something.
But there was nowhere to run. And with my hands bound, fighting was suicide.
Somewhere under the stillness, my body had already decided I was not getting out of this room alive.
My hands shook against the rope and would not stop.
My heart slammed so hard I could hear it in my own ears.
Every animal part of me was trying to claw its way out of my own skin, and there was nowhere for it to go.
So I did the only thing I could think of, the thing I was better at than I had ever wanted to be.
I made my face into a still pond. I let my shoulders drop the half inch that reads as obedience.
Under the stillness my heart went like a bird against a window, but he could not see my heart, and I had spent years teaching my body to keep his eyes off the parts of me that were still fighting.
The training held. That was the cruelest joke in the room.
The very thing he had carved me into was the one thing that had a chance at getting me out of here alive.
“The silent treatment.” Marcus sighed, moving closer. The candlelight threw his shadow across the walls, and I could have sworn the shadows twisted wrong. Moved when he didn’t. “I suppose I deserve that. I wasn’t entirely honest with you, Serena. About who I am. I’m sorry for that.”
He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded satisfied.
“Where’s Callum?” The words came out raw, scraping past my fear. “What did you do to him?”
“Why must you be unpleasant?” Marcus’s lip curled. “Forget him. There’s just you and me. As it should be.”
I warred with terror as I fought for some sense of control.
“Let me go.” I hated how small my voice sounded. How scared. “Whatever you want, you can have it. Just let me go.”
Marcus laughed. It was a gentle sound, almost tender, and it made my skin crawl.
“Oh, sweetheart.” He sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that I could smell him.
That same cologne he’d always worn, sandalwood and musk, but beneath it now I caught something else.
Something organic and wrong. Like flowers rotting in a vase.
“I already have what I want. I’ve always had it. You just didn’t know.”
He raised his hand. A small motion at his hip. His fingers spread, closed, tilted in a way I couldn’t have copied, and his lips moved around words I didn’t catch.
White rose petals fell across the bed.
They came from above me, soft and slow, dropping onto the coverlet until the dark fabric disappeared under them. The smell reached me a beat after. That overripe, cultivated sweetness I had known for nearly half of my adult life.
The same scent on my pillow in Atlanta the morning I woke to a white rose I had not put there.
The same scent on my windowsill at the rental house in Magnolia Creek.
Every time. Every place I had ever lived.
Had he ever broken in?
I thought back to it all. The locks I had changed.
The deadbolts. Six months of looking over my shoulder, certain he was picking my locks at night and slipping past my alarms. Had he done any of it?
Or had he stood somewhere far from me and made the gesture I had just watched him make, and a rose had appeared on my pillow while I slept.
Was this how he had always found me? If werewolves exist then obviously, it stood to reason that other things existed. Other things, like Marcus. I felt sick.
He reached out and touched my face.
The pulling started immediately.
A hook somewhere in my chest, dragging something vital out of me through every point of contact between his skin and mine. Cold flooded my veins, and with it came a terrible emptiness. A hollowing.
It did not hurt the way a cut hurts. It hurt the way low tide hurts a thing that needs the water, a slow ebbing grief of being made less while I lay there and let it happen, because there was nothing in my bound hands to stop it with.
I could track the places he reached. Behind my eyes.
The soft hinge of my jaw. The back of my throat where words got made.
He helped himself from all of them at once, and I went thinner everywhere at once, a candle eating itself down from the inside of the wick.
I knew this cold.
I had known it for years.
In the kitchen of our apartment in Atlanta on the nights I came home wrung out and told myself it was deadlines.
After the bad fights, when I told myself that the fights had cost me sleep.
The slow Sundays when I told myself I was just hormonal.
The empty mornings after dreams I couldn’t remember when I told myself I’d slept badly.
Three years of this exact cold, sitting in the bottom of my ribs after every night I had spent in his bed.
He had been doing this to me the whole time.