Unbroken Chains: Book 5 of The Black Chains

Stella’s POV

Darkness didn’t just hide things; it pressed heavily against your eyelids until you wondered if you’d gone completely blind. The first thing that returned to me wasn’t sight or thought. It was the smell. A toxic stink of rust and damp concrete flooded my throat, tasting like old iron. My head throbbed with a rhythmic, sickening pulse that made my vision swim behind my closed lids. I tried to lift my hand to touch my temple, but a sharp, metallic jerk yanked my arm short.

Clink. The harsh ringing of metal girders echoed off the low ceiling. My eyes shot open, fighting through the darkness. The grey shapes and sharp outlines started to come into focus. I tried to bring my legs up beneath me, but I rammed my shoulder into a cold wire cage. A cage.

Panic, sharp and white-hot, spiked straight through my chest, threatening to completely shut down my lungs. My brain scrambled back through the fog of the last few hours—the blinding explosion of the cryptographic loops failing at the compound, the gunfire, our attempt at fighting off the Mayhams, and then the heavy drug they forced down our throats in the back of that van. We had been taken. The Mayhams had breached our sanctuary, and now we were locked in the dark like livestock.

No. Stop. Breathe.

Rowan’s voice cut through the panic flooding my head. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to listen. Forced myself to do exactly what she’d taught me. Slow down. Four seconds in. Four seconds out. Again.

The frantic pounding of my heart eased just enough for me to think.

Rowan always said panic made people miss what was right in front of them. Analyze the variables. Find your baseline.

I forced myself to focus on something other than the fear clawing its way up my throat. The floor beneath me was cold and unforgiving against my skin. A faint vibration pulsed through the steel, carrying the distant hum of machinery somewhere nearby. It was steady. Rhythmic. Industrial. The kind of sound that never stopped. Underground, maybe.

Something real. Something I could hold on to.

And for the first time since waking up, I forced myself to stop panicking and start paying attention. The floor beneath me was cold, solid steel plating, vibrating slightly with the distant, mechanical hum of industrial machinery somewhere below us. The air was freezing, biting through the thin fabric of my ruined clothes. I reached out carefully, my scraped palms burning as I mapped the boundaries of my confinement. The cage was narrow—barely four feet wide and four feet high. I couldn’t stand up if I wanted to. I was entirely pinned by the iron.

Suddenly, a ragged, wet gasp broke the silence a few feet away, followed by a low, fragile whimper that made my heart drop.

“Derick...” a voice trembled, muffled and thick with pure panic. Bree.

“Bree!” I called out, my voice sounding rough and cracked in the empty void. I threw my weight against the front of the cage, the iron bars rattling aggressively. “Bree, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

“Stella?” A different voice, smaller and completely terrified, cracked from a different corner of the dark. Mia.

“I’m here, Mia. I’m right here,” I said quickly, keeping my tone as level as possible to anchor them through the chaos. “Bree, talk to me. Where are you hurt?”

“My side... and my head,” Bree whispered.

A sharp breath caught in her throat, followed by a shaky sob she couldn’t quite hold back.

I heard her shift inside the cage, metal scraping beneath her as she tried to move.

“The bleeding won’t stop, Stella.” Her words came out strained and uneven. “One of those bastards kicked me when they dragged us in.”

She sucked in a breath that sounded painful.

“I can’t get a full breath in.” Another shaky inhale. “Every time I try, it feels like someone’s driving a knife into my ribs.”

For a moment, all I could hear was her breathing—too fast, too shallow.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispered. “I know something’s wrong.”

“Stacey!” I called out into the wider dark, louder this time, my knuckles turning white as I gripped the cold bars, desperate for the one person who could handle a trauma crisis besides Rowan. “Stacey! Rowan! Are you in here? Talk to me!”

No answer came immediately. Only the low, heavy hum of the building’s generator filled the void.

“Stacey!” I screamed, the calm exterior I was forcing myself to maintain cracking just a fraction.

A heavy, agonizing groan finally rippled from the far right side of the space. It was followed by the unmistakable sound of steel chains rattling against a structural support beam.

“Here,” Stacey grunted, her voice laced with a level of pain that made my stomach twist into a hard, sickening knot. “I’m... I’m here. Don’t yell, Stell. Head feels like it’s split wide open.”

“Bree is bleeding out, Stacey,” I told her urgently, the panic bleeding through my voice. “She’s losing a lot of blood from her side, and she can’t breathe.”

The second Bree described what she was feeling, something changed in Stacey.

The fear was still there. The pain she was in was still there, too. But it all got shoved aside as her training kicked in.

“Bree, listen to me,” Stacey said immediately, her voice firm and steady in the darkness.

It was the same voice she’d probably used a hundred times in emergencies—the one that didn’t leave room for panic.

“Don’t try to sit up. Don’t keep moving around.”

I heard Bree shift slightly, followed by a sharp hiss of pain.

“Lie back if you can,” Stacey continued. “And keep pressure on the injury. As much as you can manage.”

There was a brief pause before she called out again.

“Rowan? Are you awake?”

A weak, strained voice echoed from a cage further down the row. “I’m awake,” Rowan choked out, coughing slightly as she tried to steady herself. “I’m tracking it. Bree, count your inhales for me.”

“Mia,” Stacey called out next, her voice unwavering despite the rattling of her chains. “Are you bleeding anywhere?”

“I don’t think so,” Mia whispered, her voice shaking so violently I could hear her teeth chattering in the freezing dark. “But my wrists... they tied the zip-ties too tight. My hands are completely numb. I can’t feel my fingers. It’s so cold in here. Where are we? Why is it so dark?”

“We’re in some warehouse facility or a shipping depot,” I replied, my mind calculating the echo of our voices against the structural layout. “The air is circulating through industrial vents. We’re still close to the river bypass—I can smell the dampness. The boys are already coming for us. Derick, Brandon, Sebastian... all of them. They know the routing sequence. We just have to hold on until they get here.”

“Can you move your legs, Stacey?” I asked quickly, trying to gauge how badly they had hurt her through the dark.

“Yeah,” she breathed out, her chuckle turning instantly into a sharp, sore wince. “But they clocked me pretty good with a rifle butt before they got the cuffs on. Dropped me right on the couch. My shoulder is deeply bruised and stiff as hell. Every time I rotate it, the muscle spasms.”

Stacey was already assessing herself out loud. “Rowan, track my mobility too. I need to keep the joint relatively still for now to let the spasm pass, but the bone is intact. I’m mobile.”

“Got it, Stacey,” Rowan called back, her voice strained but steady. “I’m keeping an eye on our timelines.” She said.

“Rowan, are you hurt?” I asked as I leaned my head back on the steel. “I’ve just got a nasty cut on my forehead from the kitchen island, but the bleeding is already stopping. No concussion symptoms.”

“The table...” Bree whimpered, her voice shaky as the residual adrenaline began to fade. “We dragged the oak table... we tried to lock the deadbolts... but Ray... Ray was right behind them, Stella. He looked straight at me while they threw me down. He didn’t even blink.”

Cold fear washed over me as the pieces clicked into place, shaking my body. Ray had stripped off every bit of security that we had. He had turned the blinds off, made our fence lines open, and provided the Mayhams with a perfect map of our inner house. This was not a simple setup of hostile actions; this was a well-executed kidnapping. They had taken advantage of our security mode in order to imprison us, while Hannah was only a distraction.

“They are using us to break the boys. They’re going to move us across the state line, aren’t they? Sebastian said... he said if they ever clear the southern loop, they disappear into the border cells.” Mia whispered.

“The Myahams won’t make it.” I shot back, my voice ringing with a fierce, protective certainty that I needed them to believe. “Derick is the Prez for a reason. He is too smart to be fooled. He knows the warehouse layout on the river bypass. He knows Ray’s operational habits better than anyone. They will get to us.”

“Brandon’s hunting knife,” Stacey growled from between clenched teeth, the chains making their noise once again as she moved. “Stell... after they smashed down the inside door, I saw you take the blade from the conference table. You still have it, don’t you?”

I froze, my hand instinctively sliding down toward the waistband of my ruined jeans. My fingers brushed the cold, heavy leather-wrapped hilt. When the Mayham soldiers had thrown me into the back of the transport truck, I had kept my body completely rigid, tucking the blade deep against my ribs to hide the profile of the weapon from their search.

“I’ve got it,” I murmured, the cold metal finally giving me back some sense of control after the compound’s collapse. “I’ve got the blade, Stacey.”

“Excellent,” Stacey sighed in that same resolute way that turned her into the toughest woman in the room. “Because when those gates open, we won’t be walking out of here like prize pigs. If they’re tearing down the front door, we’ll have to bleed them out from the inside.”

Stacey’s clinical authority cut through the shadows as she turned her focus back to the cage on my left. “Bree, tell me exactly where he kicked you. Is the bleeding from a cut?”

“It’s a bad scrape along my ribs,” Bree whispered, her breathing leveling out a bit as she followed instructions. “It’s stinging like hell and oozing a bit through my shirt, but I can take a deep breath now. It’s just a bruise.”

“It’s surface trauma,” Stacey murmured to Rowan, her voice changing to a matter-of-fact one, relieved. “No broken ribs. She’ll be pretty sore for a while, but she will still be able to move if necessary. Stella, get that lock undone before they return to check on us.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. We had to break these chains before the Mayhams returned to load us into the transport cells for the state line crossing.

I pulled Brandon’s hunting knife from my waistband, the mechanical click of the steel against the iron bars sounding like an absolute vow in the dark. I could barely see the locking mechanism on the cage door, but I could feel the structural seam where the heavy padlock met the chain-link latch. My hands were trembling from the cold, but I forced my fingers to move, sliding the tip of the thick blade into the narrow groove of the locking plate to feel for the pins.

“Hold on, Bree,” I muttered, applying my weight against the hilt, leveraging the steel until the frame groaned. “Just keep breathing. We’re going home.”