Snowed In, Tied Down

Chapter 1

Itold myself this was a good idea, that locking myself away in a cabin in the middle of nowhere until I finished this damn book would jump-start my creativity.

How wrong I’d been.

The snow had started as a whisper, and by nightfall, it was a roar and a whiteout.

My laptop sat on the kitchen table, silently mocking me.

Being an author was supposed to be the dream job.

It was fun, sure. It was an outlet for all the wild stories rattling around in my head.

But sometimes, I got… stuck. So I’d decided that getting away from the world might help.

It had, at first. Then the storm rolled in, and it wasn’t letting up soon.

I stood at the window, mug of tea in hand, watching thick, wet flakes blur the world outside. Everything became a smear of white noise.

The storm howled around the cabin like something alive. My reflection stared back as a pale, sleep-deprived writer on a brutal deadline. I knew my eyes were ringed with exhaustion, the kind that made reality feel like a dream.

Holiday lights framed the window, red and green and irritatingly cheerful. I traced their glow with my gaze and muttered, “Guess I’m the Grinch now.”

My phone buzzed across the table, rattling against the wood. I turned and grabbed it.

Kai: How’s it going? Need help fleshing shit out?

I groaned and texted back: Deliriously working. A storm just hit, but the cabin’s still standing. Barely.

Three dots blinked, vanished, blinked again.

Kai: You got this. Don’t overthink the trespasser scene. Make it crazy. Readers are gonna love it!

Make it crazy. The unofficial tagline of my career.

I took another sip of lukewarm tea and sat down, determined to power through. The cabin was warm enough, but I’d dragged the space heater under the table, anyway. It smelled faintly of burned dust. Common sense told me to turn it off. I told common sense to shut up.

Outside, everything blurred together. Wind, snow, and branches creaking as ice smacked the windows.

I flexed my fingers and started typing.

The horror-erotic romance was one I loved working on, and I forced myself to focus.

He wore a mask because he was scarred and dangerous. He came at night, his presence thick enough to choke the air. He watched her through the window, waiting for her to see him, too.

I groaned and hit backspace. Too dramatic. I tried again.

The masked man stood at the tree line. He watched, waiting as the storm erased his footprints as fast as he made them.

Better. Moody. Mysterious.

I got up, set down my mug, grabbed the vodka and an energy drink, and made myself a pick-me-up. Settling back at the table, I drank and typed until the words flowed.

Then… three faint taps. Soft. Measured.

I froze and looked toward the door. Probably just ice hitting the wood. But when it came again, closer this time, my pulse spiked.

“The weather,” I muttered. “It’s just the fucking storm.”

Silence answered back.

I exhaled, took another long drink, and went back to typing. Coming to a cabin in the middle of nowhere was the worst idea ever, I thought. But when Kai booked me the trip, saying it would do wonders for my creativity, I agreed. She was always right.

I sent Kai a message complaining about the storm but told her the isolation was helping. My gaze drifted to the Christmas tree in the corner. It looked like something straight out of a fifties department store catalog.

Perfect in a way that felt unnatural.

Silver tinsel shimmered under the glow of multicolored bulbs, the kind that hummed faintly when they got too hot.

Glass ornaments painted in soft pastels and metallic sheen dangled from artificial pine branches too symmetrical to be real.

A paper angel crowned the top, its edges yellowed with age, its smile cracked.

The whole thing was beautiful in that eerie, frozen-in-time way, like the kind of tree you’d see in an old advertisement, untouched by real life or the hands that decorated it.

My buzz kicked in. I took another drink and then started typing. The words on my screen blurred, and not from the vodka. For a moment, the world outside went utterly quiet before the storm howled again.

“God, I’m losing my mind,” I muttered, staring at my drink. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have poured a double.”

I focused and continued with the scene.

The knock came again. It was harder, deliberate. He was here. For her.

And then I heard it again in real life. Three heavy knocks too controlled to be the storm.

The lights flickered—out, back on, then out again long enough for my heart to stutter. The generator coughed, chugged, and the heater sputtered back to life. I sat perfectly still, the cursor blinking on my screen like a heartbeat.

The fire crackled in the hearth, a fragile heart in a body of cold wood and storm. It threw shifting light across the cabin, gold teasing at the edges of the shadowy corners, heat reaching just far enough to touch my legs. The scent of burning pine threaded through the air.

I could almost pretend I wasn’t alone.

When the lights finally steadied, I told myself to shake it off.

She told herself there was no one there—that it was all her imagination.

My fingers flew across the keyboard… until I stopped. That sound. Footsteps? My throat went dry. “Okay,” I muttered. “Fuck this. That’s enough for tonight.”

I pushed away from the table, thick socks whispering over cold wood. The windows rattled beneath the storm’s weight as I pulled the curtain aside. Whiteout. The world erased itself with every gust. The lights flickered, warping the glass and everything reflected in it.

I moved to the kitchenette, tipped the rest of my drink down the sink, and tried to laugh. It came out thin, as if swallowed whole by the cabin.

The space heater’s hum deepened, a low mechanical warning. I grabbed a handful of snacks just to have something to do and went back to the table. Typed. Deleted. Typed again. The screen’s glow washed the room in icy blue, bleeding over the beams in the ceiling above.

My phone lay beside the laptop, its signal bar dancing between one and zero like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to fuck me over completely.

She felt him watching as she wrote about him—her story threading itself into her reality.

The storm screamed harder. I pressed my palm to the hollow of my throat, dragging a nail along the dip. A nervous tick I’d carried since I was a teenager watching a horror movie about a man chasing a woman through the woods.

I closed my eyes, counting the beats of my pulse.

I imagined a gloved hand tracing the same path. Rough leather. Cold against heat. My breathing shifted, deepened. A shiver rolled through me—one that had nothing to do with fear.

So this was what spiraling felt like.

The heater clicked off. It made a stuttering death rattle, and silence rushed in to fill its place.

I turned toward the window. I couldn’t have said why, only that something in me needed to look. That’s when I saw it… movement outside.

At first, it was just negative space—snow shifting, shadows layering. Then the shapes thickened and became deliberate, until the dark took form. My pulse slammed against my ribs.

Through the large living room window, three figures stood on the porch, black carved out of the whiteout. Indistinct until I realized why I couldn’t see their faces.

They were wearing masks.

My heartbeat staggered.

“What the fuck,” I breathed, jerking upright, the chair crashing behind me. “You’re imagining it. You have to be.” There was no way the three masked men I’d been writing about could be standing outside my cabin.

I should’ve backed away. Instead, I moved toward to the window. Each step was shallow, precise. The wind plastered snow against the glass until it felt like it was violent enough to shatter and let it in.

The closer I got, the sharper their images became. Broad shoulders. Massive height. Stillness that felt sentient. A strangled sound broke from my throat as I stumbled back, hip slamming against the table. The lamp toppled, bulb bursting in a violent, white flash—then nothing.

Shadows swallowed the room. Only the Christmas lights remained, strings of red and green that made everything surreal.

The storm’s reflection sharpened their silhouettes outside. I kept to the shadows, eyes straining. The wind screamed, but they didn’t move.

“Not real,” I whispered, though my voice betrayed me. “You’re not real.” Yet they stayed, those three masked predators cut from night. Unmoving and watching, although I couldn’t see their faces.

In the faint reflection of the window, I caught my face. Wide eyes, parted lips, breath rushing out of me as fear tangled with something hungrier.

The scene I’d imagined so many times unfolded outside of the window, the ones I hadn’t yet written. A name, the first one I would have introduced, rose unbidden, burning the back of my tongue.

Roman.

And then the power cut out, and the world went black.