Page 2 of Wretched Thorns

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.