Page 1 of Wretched Thorns

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.