Total pages in book: 56
Estimated words: 54625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Chains.
Thick as fuck chains around my wrists—wrists that I was dangling from.
“What the fu—“
But then it came back to me.
The club.
The downer mood inside of it.
Leaving.
Pain.
Panic.
People.
People who couldn’t just be people because at some point, the Change had moved through me, focusing my powers, strengthening them.
But they’d kept control over me.
Then, clearly, dragged me down here, chained me up, knocked me out cold.
How long had it been?
As if answering that question, though, I saw the small barred windows toward the top of the wall. Through them, little streaks of amber and gold stretched across the sky.
It looked more like sunset than sunrise to me, though.
Had I been knocked out for nearly a full day? How was that possible?
Another scream had me looking away from the window and over toward the far side of the room.
There, cast mostly in shadow, another figure rattled their chains, their cries like that of a dying animal as three dark figures half-blocked him from view.
Clearly, they were doing something to him. Something terrible to be eliciting those sounds.
A shadow seemed to move out of nowhere, creeping closer.
And I could have sworn I heard one soft, whispered word amongst all of the screams.
“Sleep.”
Then, I shit you not, the man went from pulling against his chains and howling in pain… to dead asleep in seconds.
What the fuck was that?
Had he just hit his limit?
People could only endure so much pain. There was a real trick to torture—to inflict as much as you could while also just toying with the threshold, so they didn’t slip into the blissful peace of sleep.
But something didn’t sit right, didn’t feel right.
I hadn’t imagined that voice, damnit.
“It’s no fun now,” one of the figures declared.
“We will come back later,” another agreed.
Then as a group, they moved, their feet sliding against stone stairs before the door above groaned.
Then… nothing.
Silence, save for the chattering of my teeth from the cold and the deep breathing of the sleeping man.
That same shadow I’d seen before seemed to shift again. It crept across the wall, making its way directly across from me.
Then pausing.
Before approaching.
Not a shadow.
Shadows couldn’t move across the center of the room, couldn’t stalk toward you like a predator approaching prey.
Then it hit me.
“Sleep.”
This shadow was the source of that voice, had been the mercy that made the man pass out. Had it also been the reason I’d been so deeply unconscious?
I forced life into my feet, made them take my weight. Ignoring the way blood rushed to my arms as the strain of my body weight lifted, the pins and needles screaming through my muscles, I glared at the shadow as it moved right in front of me, stopping just a few feet away.
Then, right before my eyes, like a cloak shrugging off someone’s frame, the shadow fell away. In its place, a woman.
Not just any woman.
A fucking smokeshow of a woman.
Really, almost all human women I came across were hot as shit in their own unique ways. This one, though? She was the kind of beautiful you only saw on screen, in ads, on canvases.
She was slight and fair, her porcelain skin impossibly flawless, save for a small crescent moon-shaped birthmark to the side of one of her eyebrows.
Her inky black hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back, framing a soft, delicate face dominated by stormy blue eyes.
Eyes that were lasered in on me.
“You’re awake,” she said, her voice like a secret just for the two of us, smoky and elusive, something like the shadow she clearly was able to cloak herself in, even if I had no idea how that was possible.
“You put me to sleep,” I countered, finding my voice scratchy from, I recalled, screaming in agony for what felt like lifetimes.
“I put you into a deeper sleep,” she clarified.
“Like you did with him?” I asked, jerking my chin toward the slumped figure across the room.
“If I hadn’t, they would have kept torturing him until he died.”
“What happens when he wakes up?”
Above us, there was a chorus of laughter that was quickly drowned by the thump of music.
“I get him out of here,” she said simply, shrugging.
“How?”
To that, she reached into her pocket, producing an ancient-looking key.
I wanted to tell her to release me. But her body language was tense, distrustful. At some point, it was entirely possible she’d seen the Change in me, was questioning who I was, what I was.
I needed to gain her trust first.
“Don’t they know it’s missing?”
“No,” she said simply.
“What if they want to release one of us?”
To that, her face darkened.
“They pull,” she told me. “If the wrists and hands are small enough, just until the skin is gone.”
“And if they’re big?”
“Until the arms rip off of their bodies,” she admitted, her stormy eyes nearly going black as my own stomach sloshed around.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Hence the key.”