Chapter 1- The Stolen Queens
Stella
Darkness didn't just hide things. It pressed on my eyelids until I wondered if I'd gone blind.
The first thing that came back wasn't sight. It was smell. Rust, damp concrete, old iron, the sour-penny taste of it flooding the back of my throat. My head throbbed in a slow, sick rhythm. I tried to lift my hand to my temple and something metal yanked my wrist short.
Clink.
The sound rang off a low ceiling. My eyes flew open. Gray shapes swam out of the black. I tried to pull my legs under me and slammed my shoulder into wire.
A cage.
Panic hit like a hot knife between my ribs. It tried to take my lungs. My brain scrambled back through the fog. The clubhouse. The church room doors opening for the man who'd cooked our dinners. The shotgun blasts. The deadbolts we'd barely finished throwing. Hands. A van. A clear plastic packet and a gun against Rowan's skull.
They'd drugged us. They'd taken us.
No. Stop. Breathe.
Rowan's voice cut through the noise in my head. Four seconds in. Four seconds out. She'd taught me that in a quiet kitchen months ago, with her hand over mine, when I couldn't stop shaking after a bad dream. I squeezed my eyes shut and did it now. In. Out. Again.
The pounding in my chest eased just enough to think.
I made myself pay attention. The floor under me was steel plating, vibrating faintly with the hum of machinery somewhere below. The air was freezing and bit through my torn clothes. I reached out and mapped the cage with my scraped palms. Four feet wide. Four feet high. Wire on every side, a chain through the door. I couldn't even sit up.
Something else came to me then, soft and awful. My face hurt. The split in my brow from the chair-leg fight at the clubhouse had reopened, and blood had dried in a stiff crust down my cheek. My lip was swollen. Every part of me ached.
And the only thing I could think was: Brandon is going to lose his mind.
He'd never forgive himself for being on that mountain. I knew it like I knew my own heartbeat. He'd sit in front of those screens with his jaw locked and his hands steady, and inside he'd be coming apart in a way nobody would ever see. And when he finally found a body to put it on, God help whoever was standing there.
A wet, ragged gasp broke the silence a few feet away. Then a thin, fragile whimper.
"Derick..." The voice shook, muffled and thick. Bree.
"Bree!" I threw my weight at the front of the cage. The bars rattled. "Bree, can you hear me?"
"Stella?" A different voice, small and wrecked, from another corner of the dark. Mia.
"I'm here. I'm right here." I kept my voice level, because someone had to. "Guys, talk to me. Where are you hurt?"
"My shoulder." She dragged in a breath and it hitched. "Still out. They threw me down on it. And my ribs. One of them kicked me when they dragged us in. Stella, every time I breathe it feels like a knife."
"Stacy!" I called into the wider dark, louder, knuckles white on the bars. "Stacy! Rowan! Answer me!"
For a moment there was only the low, heavy hum of a generator.
Then a long groan rolled out of the far right side of the space, followed by steel chain rattling against a beam.
"Here." Stacy's voice scraped like she'd gargled gravel. "I'm here. Don't yell, Stell. My head feels split wide open."
"Bree's hurt. Her shoulder and her ribs, she says she can't breathe right."
Something changed in Stacy the second I said it. The fear didn't go. The pain didn't go. But they were shoved aside, and the medic took over.
"Bree, listen to me." Firm. Steady. The voice she used when a man was bleeding on a table. "Don't try to sit up. Don't thrash. Keep that arm tucked against your body and breathe shallow if you have to. Count it. In for three, out for three."
A hiss of pain. A shaky breath. "Okay."
"Rowan?" Stacy called. "Are you awake?"
"I'm awake." Rowan's voice came from a cage farther down the row, thin and wheezing. She coughed, and the cough had a wet edge that made my stomach clench. "Bree, count your inhales out loud for me. I want to hear them."
Bree counted. Rowan listened. I heard her whisper something to herself and let it go. Not a collapsed lung. Not yet.
"Mia," Stacy said. "Are you bleeding anywhere?"
"My head." Mia's teeth were chattering so hard the words came out in pieces. "It's wet behind my ear. And my hand, my right one, two fingers don't, I think they're broken. And the zip ties are too tight. I can't feel my other hand. It's so cold. Where are we? Why is it so dark?"
"Some warehouse." I leaned my head against the steel. "Industrial vents, a generator, I can smell the river. We're close to the water. Mia, listen. The boys are already coming. Derick, Brandon, Sebastian, Connor. Grave. All of them. They'll tear the whole county down to find us. We just have to be alive when they get here."
"Ray," Bree whispered.
All of us went quiet.
"He looked right at me while they threw me down," she said. "He held the door, Stella. He had the code. He didn't even blink."
Cold went through me all the way to my teeth. Ray, who'd limped behind the bar and slid me hot tea with honey when I'd had the flu last winter. Ray with his apron and his old man's knee.
He had stripped every lock we owned. He'd walked wolves through our front door and then put the key in his pocket.
"Hannah," Mia said. "The call, the voice, they used her."
"A distraction," Stacy growled. "They used a kid to pull the men off the mountain and hit us while the house was empty."
I swallowed it down. If I let the rage up, I'd scream, and screaming helped nobody. "Stacy. Where are you hurt?"
"Bullet grazed my arm. Upper left. It's not deep but it bled like a bastard. And someone broke my nose with a rifle butt." A hard, humorless snort. "I'll be gorgeous at the funeral."
"Nobody's having a funeral."
"Then I'll be gorgeous at the party after."
I almost laughed. It came out as a sob, and I choked it back.
"Stell." Stacy's voice dropped. "Brandon's knife. After they smashed the doors, I saw you take it off the table. Do you still have it?"
I froze. My hand slid down toward the waistband of my ruined jeans, and my fingers brushed cold, leather-wrapped steel. When they'd flung me in the van I'd kept my body rigid and tucked the blade against my ribs under the jacket so the first rough search wouldn't find it. They'd been looking for guns. Nobody had thought to check a woman for a hunting knife.
"I've got it," I whispered.
"Good girl." The relief in it was savage. "Because when those doors open, we are not going out of here like prize pigs. If they want to put hands on us, we make them bleed for it."
I slid the blade free. The steel scraped the wire and the sound felt like a vow. It was Brandon's. He'd pressed it into my palm months ago, in the dark of our bedroom, folding my fingers around the hilt. A woman should always have something to hold, he'd said. Then he'd kissed my knuckles, one at a time, like he was sealing the promise.
"Hold on, Bree," I breathed. I found the seam where the padlock met the latch and drove the tip into the groove. "Keep counting. We're going home."
I leaned into the hilt. The wire groaned. My hands were shaking from the cold and the drug and everything else, but the lock was old, and I could feel the pins starting to give.
Somewhere in the dark, a heavy door scraped open.
Boots. A lot of them. Coming our way.
I shoved the knife back under my jacket, and I made myself small, and I looked up through the bars at whatever was coming for us.
