Page 3 of Wretched Thorns

You’re alone. You’re scared. Your brain is making things up because it doesn’t have enough information. That’s all this is.

When I opened my eyes again, the shadows were just shadows.

But they seemed closer than before.

***

Time became meaningless in the dark.

I tried to track it at first. Counting seconds, estimating minutes, attempting to distinguish between stretches of darkness that might be hours and those that might be moments. But the room offered no reference points. No light changes. No sound from outside. No way to tell if the sun was rising, setting, or existed at all.

I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. Every time I started to drift, my mind would jerk me back with images of Callum bleeding on the floor, of Marcus’s wrong-colored eyes, of that cloth descending toward my face.

So I waited. And I watched the shadows.

Waiting was something I knew how to do. I had waited out his moods for three years, learned the exact drop in the air that came before a bad night, learned to read a slammed cabinet the way a farmer reads a sky going dark. I put that same animal patience to work now. I learned the room by inches. The cool seam of air that slid under the door and told me there was a hall on the other side of it. The grain in the silence, a faint old hum I could not place and did not yet have the sense to be afraid of. The dark did not lift, so I quit waiting for it to lift and started living inside it, the way a person learns to live inside any small and terrible place when they are made to stay there long enough.

They were definitely moving now. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but I could track them if I focused. The darkness in the corners would shift, expand, and contract. Like something breathing.

I had read somewhere that a brain starved of light will build a world out of whatever it has on hand. Faces in the grain of the dark. Movement where there is none. I told myself that was all this was, my mind playing tricks, providing me company in the dark. But the company my mind handed me did not behave the way an invention should. An invention does not go still when you turn and look at it. An invention does not seem, very faintly, to be waiting for you to look away so it can come a little closer, and then wait patiently and unhurried when you refuse to, as if it has all the time in the world and knows that you do not.

I told myself it was my eyes playing tricks. Told myself that the brain hallucinates in sensory deprivation, that this was normal, expected, nothing to fear.

But some part of me didn’t believe it. Some part of me recognized what the shadows were doing, felt an answering pull in my chest. Like calling to like.

I was still trying to make sense of that feeling when the lock turned.

I scrambled back on the bed, my heart slamming against my ribs. The door swung open, and light spilled in. Not much, just a dim glow from somewhere beyond, but after all that darkness it was blinding.

A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. Tall. Familiar.

Marcus.

He stepped inside, and the door closed behind him. The lock clicked back into place. I heard him moving, heard the scratch of a match, and then warm yellow light bloomed from a candle on the dresser. Then another. Then a third.

In the candlelight, he looked different.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. His skin had always been pale, but now it seemed to glow faintly from within, luminous and strange. The circles under his eyes were gone. The faint lines around his mouth had smoothed out. He looked younger, healthier, more vital than I’d ever seen him.

And his eyes—

His eyes had always been blue. A clear, cold blue that I’d once found striking. But now they were something else. The blue had faded to a sickly gray-green, like mold growing on old food. Like something rotting in standing water.

“Good evening, sweetheart.” His voice was the same. Warm, cultured, with that faint southern inflection that I’d once found charming. “Did you sleep well?”

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My throat had closed up, every survival instinct I possessed screaming at me to run, to fight, to do something.

But there was nowhere to run. And with my hands bound, fighting was suicide.

Somewhere under the stillness, my body had already decided I was not getting out of this room alive. My hands shook against the rope and would not stop. My heart slammed so hard I could hear it in my own ears. Every animal part of me was trying to claw its way out of my own skin, and there was nowhere for it to go.

So I did the only thing I could think of, the thing I was better at than I had ever wanted to be. I made my face into a still pond. I let my shoulders drop the half inch that reads as obedience. Under the stillness my heart went like a bird against a window, but he could not see my heart, and I had spent years teaching my body to keep his eyes off the parts of me that were still fighting. The training held. That was the cruelest joke in the room. The very thing he had carved me into was the one thing that had a chance at getting me out of here alive.

“The silent treatment.” Marcus sighed, moving closer. The candlelight threw his shadow across the walls, and I could have sworn the shadows twisted wrong. Moved when he didn’t. “I suppose I deserve that. I wasn’t entirely honest with you, Serena. About who I am. I’m sorry for that.”

He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded satisfied.

“Where’s Callum?” The words came out raw, scraping past my fear. “What did you do to him?”