Chapter Eleven
Ember
My chief advantage since being taken captive is Max’s insistence on underestimating me.
I don’t know when he knew me or how long he knew me for, but clearly, he missed the phase of my life where everything that could go terribly wrong did.
The years when constant abuse and torment led me to become extremely street-smart.
I’ve been microdosing myself with poisons, venoms, and sedatives since the first time Dagon poisoned my meal—not long after I’d recovered from my head injury. He didn’t give me enough to kill me, just enough to punish me when I pissed him off.
I spent a week vomiting and shitting blood, and writhing in agony while his soldiers urinated on me and laughed at me.
The next time he pulled that move was a year later. After dosing myself in steadily increasing increments, the dose Dagon gave me only gave me a mild fever and body aches. When his men tried to once again turn me into a urinal, I sliced one of their cock’s off and watched him bleed out.
Dagon gifted me a bottle of champagne for my progress. It’s still sitting in my designated room in his primary home, untouched. For all I know, it’s laced with the bubonic plague.
Whatever Max gives me is strong enough to put me to sleep, but only for a few hours.
When I come to and force one eye open, I glimpse rows of fields outside the window.
The moon is hanging high in the sky—I’d estimate I’ve been out for five, maybe six hours.
Longer than I’d prefer, but shorter than Max would’ve assumed.
Max is in the driver’s seat. Vivaldi’s Winter floats from the car speakers. He hums along to the tune.
He turns the car onto a dirt road… and that’s when I know I need to make a move, now.
Whatever elusive destination he’s been referring to is near—I can feel it.
I was out for too long. My limbs feel tired and uncoordinated, but I don’t let that stop me.
My hands are untied, so I force my eyes open and reach over to grasp the steering wheel.
We’re in a wooded area, and Max is going slow.
This might be my last chance to escape, which makes me reckless.
I jerk the steering wheel to the left. Max shouts something unintelligible. The car veers off into the forest, and promptly slams into a thick oak tree with a sickening screech of metal. The airbags deploy—Max’s hits him square in the face, while I press myself back against my seat to avoid my own.
I reach for the doorhandle, open the door, and spill out onto the forest floor.
Frost greets me, burning my palms. I’m not wearing shoes—only socks—and the sweatpants covering my legs aren’t thick enough to deter from the biting chill, but I don’t let that stop me.
I stand, give my head a vicious shake to clear it, and stumble my way back to the road.
My movements are uncoordinated; I’m actively fighting against whatever sedative Max gave me, and the battle is a losing one.
Full-body exhaustion weighs me down, making me want to curl up on the forest floor to take a nap, but I persevere.
If I can get to a main road, I can flag down a car, and—
Two arms wrap around me from behind, trapping me against a hard chest.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Max’s voice hisses in my ear. “Totaling my car? Really, Ember?” He lets out a growl of fury. “You are just begging to be put in your place, aren’t you, Flame?”
“Let me go!” I mean for the words to come out as a shout, but much to my consternation, they’re barely a mumble. I’m hardly clinging to consciousness.
“How are you even fucking awake?” Max hisses. “You should be out for double the time.”
He picks me up and hefts me over his shoulder. I summon whatever strength I can manage and drive my foot into his balls. He grunts, and his knees buckle. I start to fall from his shoulder, but rather than letting me hit the ground, he falls with me, taking the brunt of the pain.
“Fuck, Ember!” he roars. “You gotta protect the family jewels, you’re gonna need them—”
I rake my fingernails down the side of his face, attempting to blind him. He instinctually shoves me off himself—bad move.
I’m barely halfway to my feet when he regains his bearings and catches me again—this time, for good.
He grips my waist and tosses me over his shoulder as though I weigh nothing.
His grip on my thighs is steel, fingernails digging through the thin sweats and into my skin.
He starts stalking forward, grumbling under his breath about me being a fucking headache, and occasionally throws out a promise to punish me.
Silly boy, I think sardonically. There’s nothing you can do that hasn’t already been done.
Past
Ember: 18
College is right around the corner. The knowledge blankets my skin and sinks deep, curling into the marrow of my bones. It causes an ever-present, almost jittery sense of excitement. A hum at my breastbone that sets me alight.
College is around the corner, and I’m holding the response letters from my universities of choice.
I’ve only just fished them out of the mailbox, and I’m so distracted by weighing the letters—trying to determine whether they’re acceptances or rejections before I get to opening them—that I don’t notice the things that are off about the outside of my home.
The couch on the porch has been overturned. There’s a strange SUV idling on the dirt road right in front of it. The front door is ajar.
In the back of my mind, I chalk these irregularities up to my father coming home drunk, and forgetting to lock up, again.
Dad isn’t a bad person. He isn’t cruel, abusive, or unloving…
his only flaw is that he loves the poker table more than he loves me.
I know he has a deep affection for me, he took care of me all alone even after Mom left…
but her loss left him with a hole in his chest. One that I couldn’t fill; one that could only be filled by hitting the tables.
It’s tragic, but it’s true, and it’s the reality I’ve come to accept and find peace with.
When I toe open the front door, I don’t look up from the letters clutched in my hand.
Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, UPenn… and that constitutes my second mistake of the day.
One I pay for quite dearly when I feel something cold press against the back of my neck, followed by a chilling presence at my back.
My lips part, but no sound escapes. The letters slip from my fingers and fan out over the floor, scattering while my heart claws at my ribcage, hard, loud, and fast. I’m too frozen to move my head, so my eyes dart around the room, frantic and wide, trying to make sense of the living room…
and the sight that punches a permanent hole through my chest.
My father is in the middle of the room, tied to one of our kitchen chairs by his arms and legs.
His face is so bloodied he’s barely recognizable.
One eye is swollen shut; his lip is split and glossy with fresh blood.
He’s been beaten to a pulp, and from the shallow, rattling rise and fall of his chest, it looks like he’s barely clinging to life.
My stomach heaves. I want to run to him, but I can’t even twitch.
At first, my mind latches onto the most normal nightmare it can conjure. This must be a home invasion, or a robbery, Something random that has nothing to do with us.
But there’s nothing here worth stealing. Dad and I live on the property of the wealthy family he works for—the employers should be the target of a robbery, not us.
Then, clarity strikes as my eyes land on the figure of a man sitting on our raggedy, beaten-down sofa.
He wears a dark suit more expensive than my tuition.
His posture is casual, regal, yet predatory.
His hair is platinum blonde. His eyes, startlingly empty, are colored a muddy, innocuous brown.
His cheekbones are high, his full lips are curled into a sneer, and he carries an air of menace that thickens the atmosphere around him, making it teem with uncertainty.
“Ah,” the strange man says, eyes falling to me. He gives me a short, relatively uninterested up and down. “You must be the daughter.”
I’m frozen in place, stunned with shock and fear. Nausea threatens to take over, and I feel the peanut butter toast I had for lunch churning around in my stomach. A fine sheen of sweat gathers on the back of my neck, and goosebumps break out over my skin.
I’ve been in many strange situations throughout the duration of my life, but they have never been anything like this.
Anything this lethal, this skin-crawlingly terrifying.
I feel like the ground is about to drop out from beneath my feet.
I don’t know what’s happening, but I have a vague sense that it has something to do with my father insisting that I need to apply for scholarships.
With the late nights and the phone calls I hear him occasionally take, where he whisper-shouts at someone on the other end of the line.
“Ember.” Dad’s voice is roughened with pain and panic. “Get out of here. Go to—”
“Not so fast,” the man says. He waves his hand, indicating for me to move closer, and the cold pressing against the back of my neck—a knife?
—increases in pressure, forcing me to stumble forward.
I feel all the blood drain out of my face as I hear the click of a gun cocking, and I realize it’s not a knife.
There’s a gun pointed at the back of my head.
Whoever the man on the couch is, he’s a criminal, and a powerful one. He reeks of wealth and cruelty, and he’s here. In my home. Next to my barely-alive father.
“Ember, was it?” the man says, giving me a more careful up and down. He looks to be somewhere in his early thirties, but his eyes tell a tale of ageless cruelty. He reaches into his suit pocket, and I gasp, half-expecting him to pull out a gun.