The first sign that tonight was going to be shit was the smell.

Not the usual Brooklyn smell—garbage and exhaust and someone's questionable takeout—but something else. Something that made the back of my neck prickle with a warning my body recognized before my brain caught up. Like ozone before a lightning strike. Like the air after it rains on hot pavement.

Like danger.

I was halfway through my third espresso and my fourth hour of staring at code that refused to cooperate when the lights in my apartment flickered. Once. Twice. Then they died.

"Perfect," I muttered, setting down my mug with deliberate care on the cluttered desk. "Just perfect. Who needs electricity anyway?"

The darkness was almost complete—just the faint glow from the city bleeding through my blackout curtains, painting everything in shades of grey and shadow. I stood, reaching for my phone, and that's when I heard it.

Not a sound, exactly.

More like the absence of sound. The city's ambient hum—traffic, sirens, the couple screaming at each other in the apartment below—all of it just... stopped. Like someone had hit mute on the world.

My hand froze halfway to my phone.

Five years with Derek had taught me to trust my survival instincts, and right now every single one of them was screaming. I'd learned to read the shift in air pressure that meant a hand was about to fly, the specific quality of silence that preceded violence. I'd learned to live in my body like a feral thing, always ready to run.

The shadows in the corner of my apartment moved wrong.

Not like shadows move. Like something wearing shadow was moving.

I spun toward the kitchen, toward the knife block, because I'd learned that lesson too—never be unarmed, never be trapped, never assume anyone had your best interests. My fingers had just closed around the handle of my largest chef's knife when they came through the walls like smoke.

Actually, they came through the walls.

Not around them. Not through the window or the door. Through the solid brick and plaster like it was made of air, and I had exactly half a second to register that I was either hallucinating or my entire understanding of reality was fundamentally wrong before they were on me.

There were three of them. Maybe. It was hard to count when they moved like liquid darkness, when their edges blurred and shifted. They wore shapes almost like human bodies, but wrong—too tall, too angular, skin that seemed to absorb light instead of reflect it.

"Get the fuck away from me!" I snarled, and I meant it with every fiber of my being.

The knife came up. I'd taken a self-defense class after Derek, had spent hours in the gym learning how to make my body a weapon when I couldn't trust anyone else to protect it. I'd never actually stabbed anyone, but I'd imagined it enough times to know exactly where to aim.

The blade passed through the nearest figure like it was passing through smoke.

That's when the real panic set in—not the sharp, manageable panic of a known threat, but the ice-water terror of something that violated every rule of the world as I understood it. Knives didn't pass through people. Walls didn't have doors made of shadow. Things didn't move like that.

"No," I breathed, backing away, and I was already moving toward my bedroom, already calculating distances and exits because that's what five years of abuse teaches you—always know where the exit is. "No, this isn't—"

One of them reached for me, and where its hand touched my arm, my skin burned with cold so intense it felt like fire.

I screamed.

It wasn't a dignified sound. It was raw and animal and came from somewhere deep in my chest where I keep the parts of myself I don't let anyone see. I jerked away, and the knife clattered to the floor because my fingers had gone numb. The cold was spreading up my arm, a creeping paralysis that made my heart hammer against my ribs.

"No, no, no—" I was moving on pure instinct now, all the careful armor I'd built cracking open because this was the one thing I'd never prepared for. You can prepare for human evil. You can barricade yourself against the cruelty of people you've loved. But this—this was something else entirely.

The second figure caught my other arm, and the cold was everywhere now, eating through my nervous system like acid. My legs went weak. The world tilted. I tried to fight, tried to twist away, but they were impossibly strong. I was strong—I'd spent five years becoming strong—and it meant nothing.

"Let me go!" I thrashed, and I was still fighting when the third one moved behind me, and I felt something cold and terrible settle over my mind like a hand closing around my brain.

Everything went black.

---

I woke to the sound of water.

Not the sound of my apartment's ancient plumbing—I recognized that particular symphony of groans and clanks. This was different. Deeper. Like water the size of the ocean, lapping against stone that had been worn smooth over centuries.

My eyes snapped open.

The first thing I noticed was that I could see despite the darkness—not well, but well enough to make out shapes. The second thing I noticed was that I absolutely, categorically did not recognize where I was.

I was lying on something soft. A bed, maybe, though the fabric felt wrong under my fingers—too smooth, too cool, like touching water that had somehow become solid. The room around me was vast and cavernous, the walls a stone so dark it was almost black, and the ceiling disappeared into shadow far overhead.

And the light—there was light, but there was no source for it. It just seemed to exist, emanating from nowhere and everywhere at once, casting everything in shades of deep purple and silver.

My heart was already racing, but now it kicked into overdrive.

I sat up fast, and the room spun for a moment before settling. My mouth was dry. My head pounded. I was still wearing the same clothes—black tank top, grey sweatpants, the uniform of someone who'd given up on the concept of going outside—but they felt strange on my skin, like they'd been cleaned by something other than water.

There was a door. Actually, there were several doors, all of them made of the same dark wood, all of them closed. I picked the nearest one and tried the handle.

Locked.

Of course it was locked.

"Okay," I whispered to the empty room, and my voice sounded small and wrong in the vast space. "Okay, this is fine. You're fine. This is just... a very strange kidnapping situation. You've survived worse."

That was a lie. I hadn't survived worse. I'd survived bad, but this—this was in a completely different category.

I was pacing the perimeter of the room, testing every door, when I heard the sound.

Footsteps. Heavy and deliberate, echoing through what sounded like a corridor beyond the walls. They were getting closer.

I moved to the center of the room and stood with my feet shoulder-width apart, hands curled into fists. I'd learned to fight, but I'd also learned that sometimes the best fight was the one that started with your mind. Make yourself big. Make yourself a target that's too much trouble. Make them work for whatever they wanted.

The largest of the doors swung open without anyone touching it.

The man who entered did so with the kind of grace that suggested he'd never been ungainly a day in his life. He was tall—so tall that he had to duck slightly under the doorframe—and he moved like something that had been born knowing exactly where its body was in space.

He was also, objectively, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

That was the first problem.

The second problem was that I recognized him.

I'd seen him before, in dreams that felt too real to be dreams, in the kind of vivid, sensory nightmares that lingered when you woke up gasping. He had skin that seemed almost luminescent in the strange light, and eyes that glowed faintly silver—not reflecting the light but generating it. His hair was dark, nearly black, falling in waves past his shoulders. He wore clothes that looked like they'd been designed by someone who understood that luxury was a weapon: a deep blue tunic that seemed to shift color as he moved, dark leather pants, and silver that adorned his wrists and throat with an elegance that made me want to scream.

He smelled like night-blooming jasmine and ozone and something wild that made my hindbrain scream at me to run.

"Good," he said, and his voice was exactly as I remembered it from those dreams—like velvet and distant thunder, like something that had learned to speak human language but never quite forgot it wasn't human. "You're awake."

I stared at him.

For a moment, I couldn't process what I was seeing. My brain was still trying to file this under "hallucination brought on by stress and too much caffeine," but some part of me—the part that had kept me alive through five years of hell—knew that this was real.

"Where the fuck am I?" My voice came out hoarse, but it came out steady. That was something. That was a start.

The man's lips curved into a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

"You're in the Twilight Court," he said, and he said it like I should know what that meant, like it was a place that existed in the world I knew. "You're in my realm. And you're exactly where you need to be."

I felt something crack open in my chest—not fear, which I'd learned to manage, but something worse. Something like the ground disappearing beneath my feet.

"I don't know what this is," I said slowly, "but you need to take me back. Right now. I have a job, I have an apartment, I have a life—"

"Had," he corrected, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it. "You had a life. That life is over now."

The words hit me like a physical blow.

For five years, I'd been learning how to take control of my own existence. I'd left Derek. I'd built a career in cybersecurity that meant I could work from anywhere, make money without depending on anyone. I'd spent sixty months becoming untouchable, building walls so high that nothing could penetrate them.

And this—this man, this thing, had just erased it all with six words.

The rage that filled me was clean and hot and absolutely clear.

"No," I said, and I felt it settle into my bones like something that had been waiting there all along. "No, that's not how this works. You don't get to do that. You don't get to just decide that my life is over. I don't care what you are or where I am or what kind of crazy supernatural bullshit is happening—you're going to take me back, or I'm going to find a way out of here, and you're not going to stop me."

I took a step toward him.

He didn't move, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop about twenty degrees. The silver in his eyes flared brighter.

"You don't understand," he said softly.

"Then explain it to me," I snapped. "Explain to me why you thought kidnapping someone was a good idea. Explain to me what you want from me. But do not, under any circumstances, tell me that my life is over because I don't accept that. I don't accept it from you, I don't accept it from anyone, and I sure as hell don't accept it from some asshole with glowing eyes who smells like a thunderstorm."

Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or amusement. It was gone too quickly to tell.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Iris," I said, because there was no point in lying. "Iris Blackwood. And you are?"

"Kael Thornwick," he said, and the name sounded like power, like something that had weight and history and the kind of gravity that pulled things into its orbit. "I am the Prince of the Twilight Court, and I orchestrated your abduction because I need something from you that you're not going to want to give me."

At least he was honest. I could respect the honesty, even if I wanted to punch him in his beautiful, glowing face.

"Let me guess," I said, taking another step toward him. "You're going to keep me locked in this room until I agree to whatever insane thing you want. Maybe you need a human sacrifice. Maybe you need a virgin—which, joke's on you, I'm not—maybe you need my blood or my tears or some other delightful bodily fluid. Is that the plan?"

"No," he said, and he took a step toward me.

I should have backed away. Every instinct I'd honed over five years told me to create distance, to keep myself out of arm's reach. But I didn't. I held my ground, and when he stopped just close enough that I could feel the cold radiating off his skin, I didn't flinch.

"Then what?" I demanded.

"I need you to stay," he said quietly. "I need you to stay, and I need you to not leave, and I need you to stop trying to escape because if you do, my sister will use it as an excuse to kill you, and I find that I'm not willing to allow that to happen."

His eyes were luminous in the strange light, and I could see something in them that looked almost like sincerity. Almost like loneliness.

I ignored it. I'd learned that lesson too—the danger of seeing humanity in someone who was hurting you.

"That's not a plan," I said flatly. "That's a threat with extra steps."

"Yes," he agreed, and he reached out and tucked a strand of my short hair behind my ear with a gentleness that made my skin crawl. "It is."

His fingers were cold against my skin, and where they touched me, I felt something ignite low in my belly—a spark of something that was absolutely not attraction and absolutely not the reason my breath had caught in my throat.

I jerked away from him.

"Don't touch me," I said, and I meant it with every fiber of my being.

He dropped his hand, and there was something that might have been regret in his expression.

"I'll have someone bring you food," he said, moving back toward the door. "There's a bathing chamber through the second door on the left. Your clothes will be replaced with more appropriate attire. And Iris?"

I glared at him.

"Try to escape if you like," he said, and he smiled that smile again—the one that didn't reach his eyes. "It's what I would do. But know that there are guards outside that door, and they have instructions to bring you back alive. Unharmed is negotiable."

He left before I could respond, and the door swung shut behind him with a finality that echoed through the vast chamber.

I stood in the middle of that impossible room, my heart hammering against my ribs, and I did something I hadn't done since I left Derek.

I sat down on the edge of that soft, water-like bed, and I let myself shake.

Just for a moment.

Just until I could breathe again.

Then I stood up, dried my eyes with the back of my hand, and started looking for a way out.

Because that's what I did. That's who I was. I survived. I fought. I refused to be owned.

And if this beautiful, dangerous, impossible man thought he could break me, he was about to learn that I'd been breaking myself into smaller and smaller pieces for five years just to survive.

He didn't stand a chance.