“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting right now.” The smile softened. “I told you – I can find you whenever I want.”
“That’s either romantic or terrifying.”
“It’s both. Most things about us are both.”
I looked at him – the profile, the jaw, the hands on the wheel – and felt the complicated, layered thing that living with someone produces: affection and frustration and desire and suspicion and the persistent, nagging awareness that he was still hiding something from me.
“Caelum-“
“Marlowe, look out!”
The truck came from the left. Not gradually – instantly, the way nightmares arrive, filling the windshield with metal and light and the sound of a horn blaring like a scream made mechanical. Caelum wrenched the wheel. The tires shrieked. The world tilted – sky where the ground should be, ground where the sky should be – and then the tree, sudden and solid and absolute, and the impact that turned everything into noise and glass and the specific, percussive violence of a human body meeting a surface it was never designed to meet.
My head hit the window. The pain was white – not a color but an event, a detonation behind my eyes that erased thought and sight and everything except the animal certainty that something very bad had just happened to me.
Then: dark. A gap. A fold in time where consciousness should have been and wasn’t.
I came back in pieces. Sound first – a ringing, distant, like a bell underwater. Then sensation – pain, everywhere, concentrated at my temple where something warm and wet was running down the side of my face. Then vision – blurred, fractured, the world seen through a shattered lens.
The car was wrapped around the tree like a hand around a fist. The windshield was a web of cracks. Steam hissed from the crumpled hood.
Caelum was slumped over the steering wheel. Not moving. Blood at his hairline, dark and slow.
“Caelum-” My voice was a rasp. My hand reached for him but my arm wouldn’t cooperate – heavy, wrong, operating on a delay.
I turned. The back seat. Sable was stirring – pale, dazed, alive. And Rowan-
Rowan wasn’t moving.
The panic arrived like a flood – instant, total, drowning everything else. I tried to reach for him, tried to turn my body, tried to do anything other than sit pinned in the wreckage of a car that had been a sanctuary thirty seconds ago-
The door beside me opened. Not from the inside. From outside. Hands – gloved, strong, impersonal – reached in and grabbed me. Two men. Black clothes. Masks. Moving with the rehearsed efficiency of people executing a plan they’d practiced.
“No-” I thrashed. Kicked. Screamed. The sound that came out of me was not a word but a frequency – raw, primal, the sound of a creature being taken. “Let go of me! CAELUM! SABLE!”
They didn’t respond. They didn’t slow down. They dragged me from the car and across the asphalt, and I could see, in the fractured glimpses my spinning vision allowed – the wrecked car, Caelum’s slumped form, Sable’s pale face in the back window – and then the door of a black SUV swallowed me, and the door slammed, and the engine roared, and the world I’d been living in – the hospital and the kiss and the roses and the cage – shrank in the rear window until it was nothing.
I was gone.
The drive was a blur of darkness and pain. My head throbbed. Blood dried on my temple in a crust that pulled when I moved. The men in the front seats were silent – professionally silent, the silence of people who’d been paid not to speak. The SUV ate miles of empty road, and the city fell away behind us, replaced by trees and darkness and the growing, horrible certainty that wherever I was going, I was going alone.
They brought me to a warehouse. The word doesn’t capture it – it was a cathedral of abandonment, vast and hollow and cold, the kind of space where echoes live and light goes to die. They pulled me from the car, half-carried me inside, and tied me to a chair in the center of the concrete floor. The rope bit into my wrists. The cold seeped through my clothes. The single overhead bulb cast a circle of yellow light around me and left the rest of the building in darkness.
One of them threw water on my face. Cold. Sharp. The gasp it produced was involuntary, and it dragged me fully into consciousness with the brutality of a hand pulling someone from underwater.
I blinked. My vision was still swimming, still unreliable. The warehouse resolved itself in fragments – rafters, shadows, the distant gleam of corrugated walls.
And then: footsteps.
Slow. Measured. Echoing in the vast emptiness like a metronome counting down to something. A figure emerged from the darkness – white shirt, jeans, moving with a calm that felt performative, curated, the walk of a man who wanted his entrance to be felt before it was seen.
He stopped in front of me. Crouched. His face was still a blur – the blow to my head had turned the world into an impressionist painting, edges soft, details smeared.
I blinked again. Again. The blur receded. The features sharpened. The face assembled itself from the fog, piece by piece – the jaw, the eyes, the careful, familiar expression of someone I’d trusted.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.