CHAPTER 1
ELODIE
The dark is my friend now. My first memories of darkness are not so friendly. Where I’d look into a corner and see the monsters lurking in the depths, carrying with them that foreboding malice, telling me they’ve come to gobble me up.
But now the monsters are my friends. I talk to the shadows and the beasts inside them. They keep me safe. Conjured up from the remnants of nightmares that only exist now at the edge of my consciousness. Because over the past twenty-one years of my life, I’ve encountered so many things that are worse than the entities that haunt our dreams and dark corners.
Those faceless monsters only ever lurk, tease, and haunt. They never reach out, touch, or hurt. But everyone in my life does just that.
They started talking to me a couple years back. They told me not to be afraid, that the dark can save me. And it has. Over and over. At first, I didn’t believe them. Why would I? But recently, I’ve come to find the darkness is the only solace I have left.
When he locks me up in here, they think it’s a punishment. And sure, physically, it is. Barely any water, no daylight for the skin, no food that’s normally required for the basic running ofthe anatomy. It used to be bearable, back when my older brother Lewis used to sneak down here and stay with me for a little while, leaving just before our dad discovered where he was. He got me through it. But since they took my brother from me, the darkness has become my ointment.
They can break my skin, flesh and bones, but mentally, they can’t break me.
Not when I’ve been broken my whole life.
I’ve been in this dingy cell for six days now in preparation for today. Not the longest imprisonment I’ve had, not by a long shot. I only learned to count the days by being given a dog bowl of water twice a day. No windows to see the rotation of the sun, certainly no clock.
The cell is made up of three sandstone walls with a steel wall making up the fourth. Only a few air holes break up the perfectly solid metal, along with one steel door in the middle of it that makes a bone-shaking, ear-piercing shriek whenever it’s shoved open and scrapes along the stone floor. No windows. No light coming in, no light going out. My family’s castle is hundreds of years old. The steel wall had rusted and eroded long before I became a resident behind it. The bricks have a spiderweb of cracks. Sometimes I picture the cracks spreading, expanding, then gloriously crumbling down on top of me.
He put me in here to make sure I was too weak to protest today. So that I went willingly. Which was smart. I’m capable of being quite a nuisance when someone tries to touch me. Courtesy of my savage father. Nothing’s off limits for me when it comes to self-defence.
And so, I’ve been starved and beaten for the past six days to make sure I go with my husband-to-be without fuss. I don’t know who it is, Dad wouldn’t tell me, which only led me to believe it’s someone who I would put all my strength into resisting. We don’t know any good people in this life. Whenyou work in the underworld, where every person you know will either kill you, rape you, or keep you alive long enough to wish you were dead, it’s highly unlikely any of them would get the husband of the year award. All I knew was that we were integrating our family into a new business venture, then all of a sudden, I’m engaged to someone I’ve never met.
While it’s true my body is limp and heavy like a bucket of gold, and there is no way I can lift a finger right now, my mind is fully intact. Totally aware and coherent. My brain is impenetrable. Too many cracks and holes and fractures in it to be broken any further. My body is practically the same. I feel nothing. I’ve been numb for too long now.
The beautiful organ inside my skull is a masterpiece of amendments. Broken down and glued, stitched, and soldered back together a thousand times, and is no longer a fully functioning thing to destroy anymore. I’m a maniac. Lunatic. Psycho. It’s what I’m told on a daily basis, anyway.
And my future husband is apparently the only one who can handle me now.
All I see in that is a challenge I’m not going to lose. I may have been overpowered by my dad more times than I could count, but there was incentive to stay here for a while. As of a few weeks ago, there’s no more incentive. Not now I can no longer look for my brother’s murderer. Nothing’s keeping me here apart from this cage. Once the cage is gone and my strength is back, and I’ve got the money I need, I’m gone.
To where, I don’t know. As long as there are no sharp, pointy things and a place where the darkness can dwell with me, it’ll be a start.
It’s dank in here, but I no longer smell what lingers in the stagnant air. My senses have become long accustomed to the particles of rotting flesh and other rancid stenches thatcome from the body. Makes me wonder how many bodies have decayed in this little dungeon.
They’re coming for you,the darkness whispers.
I hear the echoing footsteps from a distance. I don’t move. The cold stone of the floor has moulded to my skin.
They grow closer, the clack of expensive loafers on cobblestones racketing through my body. Maybe I’ve melted beneath the ground, perhaps they won’t find me in here at all.
A jingle of keys. A scrap of metal on metal.
Don’t fear, Elodie,the darkness caresses with its gentle hiss,we’ll come with you.
I silently thank them. I’m going to need them to get through the rest of my life.
The ear-piercing squeak of my cell door bounces off the walls as it opens.
My eyes are closed, but even behind my eyelids, the light floods in and slices through my retinas. I squeeze them shut tighter.
“Wakey, wakey, sunshine.” It’s my father’s grating bellow of a voice.
Even if I wanted to open my eyes to see him, peel my cracked, tight lips apart to respond, I don’t have the energy. I’m simply a dormant vessel for my soul. Incapable of movement. Exactly how they wanted me.
He smacks his hands together in a ringing clap. I feel the wince in a body that’s been still for too long. The sharp motion sending a firework of pain through my skull.
