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But that moment doesn’t come.

He uncuffs me, and I collapse to the floor. Blood pumps into my head in tired, spent spurts, all thoughts dismantled. Eli tosses me a linty bar from his pocket to choke down while the obsidian floor ices my wounds—even the strange fabrics they use aren’t immune to lint.

He settles on the floor, his back to the door, arms wrapped around his legs, and that lucky stone of his in hand, black with shimmery blue and silver. He rests his chin on his knees, and jet-black curls fall over his face, framing the darkness of his gaze. That’s all his hair ever does, but I notice it every fucking time. Screw him for looking like a damn sculpture with ringlets andmuscles and a smirk that makes my blood cells bicker, unable to agree on which body part to occupy.

He flips the stone in his fingers while I cling to the floor, too drained to pick up the bar, and wishing for death over another day with Mallace tomorrow. Then warmth blankets my body, a lightness tugging at me and bringing comfort I can’t explain or justify. My mouth is sore and stretched from Mallace’s fist inside it, leaving me quiet, which I’m sure delights the fuck out of Eli.

Visions strike out of nowhere as the hours pass, cruel and harrowing. I don’t know if meaning is woven into them, but those visions, that suffering, may be the only reason I haven’t shut down completely. All the death, all the loss, time and time again, takes the edge off the shock. Maybe I can convince myself it’s all another vision, that I’ll return to reality soon, and that’s the comfort—and the lie—that I’ll embrace through the pain.

Only the blue light of the moon defies the dark of night, morning still far off. I blink, letting the haziness of sleep fade away enough to notice the footsteps behind me.

Then a hand slams over my mouth.

Part 2

Bound

Chapter

Thirteen

An arm slides around my waist, all but crushing me as I’m lifted up.

“Are you going to come willingly?”

That scent of a dark cave, of empty space and time unending shoves its way up my nose. A frantic tap of fingertips rushes down my neck and back. Eli’s size is even more apparent when I’m pressed into him and can’t think of anything but the hardness of his body. Dammit. He gathers me closer, his heart beating into my back, his hand on my mouth.

“Never,” I spit out through his fingers.

He gains a tighter hold across my middle, trapping my arms and squeezing the air out of me. “Then we’ll do it the hard way.”

“I doubt you’re capable of making me come,” I wheeze into his hand.

“You think I don’t know how to take care of what’s mine?” His lips brush my ear, the shudder reaching my toes.

A rush of heat hits between my thighs.Why does my body hate me?“You don’t own—” His hand crushes down harder, and I give up on my garbled words.

“Shh. It’s okay. I know that scent of yours by now. You want to be mine, little prisoner.” His hand is too tight on my mouth for any chance of him deciphering the excessive curses that follow.

He carries me out of the black room, my feet dangling above the ground, my body squirming viciously as we leave behind the obsidian walls and the crooked bars of the arched window. He closes the heavy door and schleps me through pitch blackness, then through another door, and another, a maze of connected windowless hallways. I only hear the click of a lock and the scrape of stone each time he puts me down to pull open a door.

But he must know exactly where he’s going, never stopping to feel along the wall, never slowing. I writhe in his arms as he powers on, trying not to think of all the ways he could take my life—how easily he holds me in place, how little force it would take in the right spots for my breath to dwindle to rasps of nothingness until I’m limp in his grasp. Or how those same hands could do so much more.

He walks on, grunting and adjusting his clutch on me until a final door sends us out into the moonlit night air. We enter the shadowy woods. It’s the first time I’ve breathed in the fresh pine air since I saw that little boy and the sack went over my head, though I’m not sure I ever actually saw him. The trees of Sonnet that called to me upon my forced arrival, luring me closer like the land beyond the edges of a map, now haunt me with the promise of pain. I want home more than ever.

Eli slides me down until my feet brush the ground, holding my back to him, his grip unrelenting. My cheeks cave inward with the pinch of his fingers. He has me walk in front of him, our bodies pressed together despite the bump of his knees on the back of my legs, each step cumbersome and out of sync. I struggle against his locked arm until my energy whittles down to feeble jerks of my body, leaving me slack, my head resting against the curve of his chest.

“Done rubbing yourself all over me like a feral animal?” he whispers in the dark. “Too bad.”

I growl into his hand.

Deeper and denser, the air grows colder and crisper as he guides our four graceless legs through the musty dampness of the woods, the rustling of leaves below our boots turning into the snapping of twigs.

A thick fog descends and settles above our heads, blocking the view of the treetops. I try to orient myself and add to my map, but with my head pulled back to his chest, all I see is the hazy mist. It grows heavier, threatening to surround me in yet another inescapable embrace.

We venture on until we reach an old house—a ridged bark exterior, warped wooden planks for the porch and a scattering of scrap-wood shingles on the pointed cones of the roof reaching into the sky, appearing and disappearing behind the fog. No one and nothing else is around. Not a single window is visible from this angle, and I swear it’s on the verge of collapse. The moonlight falls everywhere but on the ancient structure.

He drags me right past the front door and the side of the house, around to the back, then removes his hand from my mouth and stomps his boot on the double doors of a hatchway entrance on the ground.