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I try to slip away. “You arenottaking me into a basement. I’ve read books. Nothing but ropes and chains and blindfolds and shit.”

He chuckles into my ear. “What kind of books have you been reading?”

“The dark and twisty kind.” I toss myself side to side in his arms, only ire in my voice. “Now let go of me.”

As if I awoke a beast, his hand clamps onto my throat, holding the back of my head tight to his chest and stilling my movements. “You aren’t afraid of me.”

“Fuck no,” I rasp.

I should be, but apart from Kaleida, he’s the only one who doesn’t terrify me. And the way he riles me up, spurs a fight in me, the way his fingers press so hard into my neck…the way he decides if I take another breath—it has me panting in his grasp, my core aching.

I hate him.

He squeezes tight, cutting off all air as I sift through my final thoughts, unfortunately—or fortunately—of his hard cock at the bottom of my spine and less fatal things he could have done with my throat. He lets go and flips me around to face him, a puzzled look softening his glare. “How could that be?”

Good question.I guzzle down air as the blackness fades.

I’m about to deliver a full rant when footsteps near with loud clunks. Metal scrapes and a door swings upward. Beady eyes look up at us from under a furrowed brow. The man has choppy brown hair with a short beard to match.

“You’re really doing this?” He tucks himself into the edge of the stairs, sucking in his belly to let us by, loosening the blue fabric of the jumpsuit stretched across his middle.

“Not now, Sypher,” Eli says, a hint of annoyance in his voice, and drags me down the stairs and across the room.

In those few precious seconds, I try to assess every wall and door and corner to find a way out, but it’s a basement. There’s one way out, and it just slammed shut.

The stairs lead down into a spacious rectangular area, even colder than the black room. Two barred windows, each barely half a foot tall, sit above ground level along the edge of the ceiling, letting in the muted moonlight that seems to shy away from the house. Doors line the left wall—one, two, three, and at least one more down a narrow hallway that extends beyond the rest of the room. The doors, like the walls, ceiling, floor and stairs, are made of rough stone—not the shiny obsidian of the black room, but a dark leaden gray. Instead of blocks cemented together like I’d expect of a stone structure, it’s like a slice out of a solid mountain of rock, hollowed out and cut into the shape of a room. Once again, the space offers no light fixtures or outlets, and I don’t think it’s because it’s a basement.

The wall next to the stairs is bare, while the right wall has a corkboard—or something like cork—halfway down. Knives are stuck in it, pure metal from hilt to blade. They sit mostly near the middle, as if the thrower had a disturbingly consistent aim. A single wooden chair is pushed against the wall below the corkboard, and beyond that is a sink with a doorless cabinet beneath and a cluttered wooden counter to the side. And in the corner—

Eli gives me a shove, closing me inside a tiny cell in the far right corner of the main basement room—barely four by four feet, a quarter the size of the black room we left behind. Two walls of floor-to-ceiling bars form the cell, and while the stone of the basement is dulled with time and crumbling around the doors, the black bars look freshly installed—free of nicks and imperfections and just far enough apart to get an arm through. He locks the cell door with a jagged stone.

No no no.

The small space crushes inward, and I panic. And curse. A lot. I bang my fists against the bars, each impact shooting up to my shoulders.

Eli leans against the cabinet, arms crossed and feigning fascination with the toes of his boots while the man he called Sypher sits on the stairs, scowling. When my hands go numb and I’ve gone through every curse word dozens of times, I stop my racket and fall to the floor, defeated, trembling from my core and surrounded by the dirty ruby red of my torn dress.

“Good thing no one can hear you.” Eli scratches along his jaw, as though I’ve bored him, and strolls the two steps up to the door of the cell, peering in at me. “Is your little mouth done?”

I force myself to stand and slip two hands around the black bars while I glare at him. “What is this place?”

“The castle.”

Castle?“It’s a basement.”

He rolls his head around, perusing the room. “Strong walls, built to protect, important person inside…It’s a castle, just underground.”

“More like strong walls, built to imprison,crazyassholeinside.”

He smiles. “Whatever shuts you up.”

“Now what?” Sypher asks, rising from the step.

“Now, I need a break.” Eli digs two hands into his hair, ringlets popping up between his fingers. “I’ve been away from home, working double twelve-hour shifts for a week and a half.” He turns to leave.

“What do you want from me?” I ask, causing him to swivel back.

He takes hold of a bar and leans in to whisper. “Some quiet would be nice.”