Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
I wake on the floor beside the bed.
The carpet is rough under my cheek, and the room is still dark, and for one second I don't know where I am. Then the ache in my back tells me, and the cold tells me, and I remember. I've been sleeping here for three months.
Above me, the bed creaks as someone shifts. I hear her breathing, slow and deep, and under it his, lower, heavier. The two of them, in the bed that used to be ours. I lie on the floor and listen to them breathe and I don't move, because moving would mean admitting I'm awake, and I'm not ready to be awake.
The key is around my neck. I feel it before I touch it — the cord, the small cold weight of it against my chest. The key to my own cage. I wear it like a dog wears a tag. I reach up and close my hand around it, and the metal warms in my palm, and I think about the fact that I could use it. I could unlock myself. I never do.
My alarm is set for six. It always is. I'll get up and make the coffee, the way I always do, and I'll pour it for them, and I'll be useful, because that's the thing I know how to be. That's the thing I've always known how to be.
The floor is cold. I'm hard inside the cage, and it hurts, and that's the first thing I feel every morning now — the wanting, trapped, before I've even opened my eyes.
Ava sits up in bed, and the first thing I see is the collar.
It's black leather, wide, with a steel ring at the front, and it sits against her throat the way it's sat for three months. She touches it when she wakes — two fingers, the same gesture she used to make at her own bare throat when she was thinking. Only now there's leather under her fingers, and a ring, and she doesn't have to think about it anymore. It's just there.
Cole's hand comes up behind her and settles on the back of her neck, his palm over the collar, and she leans into it. The gesture is the same one I've watched a hundred times — his hand on her neck, the way you'd hold a dog that's about to jump — but now there's leather between his skin and hers, and somehow that makes it worse, or better, or both.