Prologue
MIND GAMES
© Kadya, 2025
All rights reserved.
This e-book is offered free to read, but it is not free to copy, reproduce, upload, distribute, or modify. No part of this book may be shared or reposted digitally or physically without the author’s written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Unauthorized use or distribution of this e-book is prohibited.
Triggering Themes
This novel contains themes and scenes that may be disturbing or triggering for some readers, including:
Abduction & captivity
Psychological manipulation
Mind control / conditioning (“the Voice”)
Gaslighting & coercive control
Memory loss / fractured identity
Medical restraint & facility confinement
Chase scenes & violence
Armed soldiers / weapon threats
Emotional abuse
Power imbalance & forced dependency
Trauma responses & panic episodes
Dark, claustrophobic environments
Unreliable reality / hallucination-like moments
Reader Advisory
MIND GAMES is a psycho-noir thriller that delves into themes of abduction, psychological manipulation, fractured memory, and coercive control.
The story explores the blurred lines between danger and safety, trust and deception, reality and conditioning. Elements of confinement, emotional pressure, and trauma recovery are central to the narrative.
Reader discretion is advised. This book may not be suitable for all audiences.
(Skylar's POV)
My hands won’t stop shaking.
Blood slicks my fingers, warm and thick, sliding down my wrists in trembling lines. I don’t know if it’s mine or his or someone else’s. It doesn’t matter. Everything feels slippery. Wrong. Tilted.
Like the world keeps flickering between the forest and the white rooms—
between me and the version they tried to build.
Smoke curls through the air, acid and metal and memories I can’t outrun.
There’s a body on the ground in front of me.
I don’t look at his face.
If I look, I’ll see him.
If I look, I’ll remember what he said right before I broke him.
Behind me, I hear breathing—ragged, uneven, desperate.
Kassim.
I don’t turn.
I can feel him shaking, too.
“Skylar.” His voice cracks when he says my name. “What did you do?”
I laugh.
God, the sound is wrong. It comes out jagged, like something inside my chest cracked open and let all the broken edges spill out.
“What I had to,” I whisper.
The flames behind us roar louder, eating the facility from the inside out. I watch the fire chew through the bones of the place that destroyed me. That made me. That ruined the version of myself I was supposed to be.
“He tried to take me,” I say, finally looking at Kassim.
His eyes widen; he wasn’t ready for that.
Good.
“He said I was property,” I spit. “He said I belonged to the program. That I was never supposed to leave. And you—” My throat closes, hot and tight. “You didn’t deny it.”
Kassim steps forward like the ground is breaking beneath him.
His shirt is ripped, stained with blood not his, his breath unsteady.
“Skylar… you’re not thinking clearly.”
“I’m thinking better than I ever have.” I take a step toward him.
He freezes.
He should.
“I remember things now.”
His jaw locks. His eyes flick to the burning ruins behind me. He knows exactly what that means. Exactly what I’ve recovered.
“You lied to me,” I say.
“I protected you.”
“You controlled me.”
“I kept you alive.”
“You owned me.”
His face twists—a flash of guilt, anger, panic, all tangled together like a wire strangling him from the inside. He tries to take another step, then hesitates.
He’s afraid of me.
Good.
I get closer, slow enough that he feels it before he sees it.
Close enough to feel the heat of his body.
Close enough to feel something else twisting between us—dark, electric, dangerous.
I lower my voice to a whisper made of smoke and cracked glass.
“Look at what I’ve become.”
He does.
And I watch the moment it hits him—the truth he tried so hard to avoid:
I’m not the woman he carried out of the hospital.
I’m not the weapon they tried to build in the facility.
I’m something in between.
Something unstable.
Something with teeth.
“Skylar,” he breathes, “don’t do this.”
“I’m done listening,” I say.
“I’m done obeying.”
“I’m done letting anyone decide what I am.”
The flames spit sparks into the air, lighting the night in violent orange. The fire wants me, calls to me, like it recognizes me as its own. Maybe it does.
I turn away from Kassim—just slightly.
“Where are you going?” His voice cracks fully this time, the mask breaking.
“Back into the dark,” I say.
“Where I was made.”
The facility hisses, groans, collapses in on itself.
Good. Let it die screaming.
I step into the smoke.
Kassim shouts my name—once, twice—each one raw enough to bleed.
I don’t look back.
But I hear him behind me.
Following.
Because he always does.
