Page 1 of Crushed Vow

Chapter 1

CHARLOTTE

The psych ward is a sterile hell, its fluorescent lights buzzing like trapped wasps, the walls a peeling gray, streaked with scratches from desperate fingernails.

I sit on a thin cot, the coarse fabric of my standard-issue gray smock scratching my skin, my once-vibrant hair matted, my face a dim shadow of the woman who stormed out of Cassian’s penthouse... months ago? A year? I’d lost track—but time had passed. Enough to forget the sound of my own laugh.

My fingers tremble around the edges of a tattered jotter, its pages worn thin from repetition—every inch crammed with desperate ink:

I AM NOT MAD.

I AM NOT MAD.

I AM NOT MAD.

The letters bleed together. My vision swims. My mind is a shattered mirror, reflecting jagged fragments of a life I can’t escape. Cassian’s voice slithers through the cracks, sharp and cruel:

“Slutty daughter of a bitch.”

“flat as a boy.”

His chains. My scars. The cold laughter. The burn of humiliation.

My body curls in on itself, breath shallow, heart dragging itself across broken glass.

“I’m not mad,” I whisper, again and again, rocking slightly as the heat presses in around me like a fever. Sweat beads on my temple, but I’m still shivering.

The door creaks open.

I flinched.

Tess stepped in—my roommate, if that word meant anything here. Wild, unbrushed curls and twitchy eyes, always barefoot and whispering to her own shadow. Her diagnosis was something dissociative. Split reality. We never talked about it.

She marched over and ripped the notebook from my hands. “You’re at it again, Charlotte?” she snapped. “Everyone here’s fucked in the head. Get over it.”

“I’m not...” My voice cracked. “I was never meant to be here. I’m not like the rest of you.”

Tess gave a sharp, humorless laugh. “That’s what we all say—right before they up the meds.”

It started when I left Cassian.

I had walked away. For the first time, I truly walked away. I packed my bags, turned off my phone.

I’d called Ethan, an old high school friend, arranging to meet at his Brooklyn loft to hide me while I planned my next move. I’d booked a cheap hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, a backup, my heart pounding with freedom.

But as I reached Ethan’s brownstone, two black SUVs screeched to a stop. Men in dark suits leapt out, their faces blank, and I froze, my mind screaming they’d shoot. Instead, a cloth pressed over my mouth, chloroform burning my lungs, my body slumping as darkness swallowed me. That’s the last I remember.

I woke here, in this psych ward, strapped to a cot, the smock itching, my wrists bruised from restraints.

Dr. Hargrove, the clinical director, met me that first day, his voice cold, clinical. “Your family brought you here, Charlotte.Acute psychotic episodes, triggered by substance abuse—hallucinogens, amphetamines. You were a danger to yourself.”

Bullshit. I don’t smoke, don’t touch drugs, but his file had my name, my photo, a forged history of addiction.

By reason of being caged with others like Tess—screaming, scratching, lost—I’ve started to doubt who I am.

My name? My memories? My mind?

The lines had all blurred.