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The next time my eyes open, it’s to a vaulted ceiling arcing above me in a sweep of time-weathered stone, soaring high enough that the shadows gather at the top like a congregation of ghosts. I look around to find the floor is all stone, too—all of it worn smooth beneath... beneath what? Bracing my churning stomach, I test my body with an experimental turn and feel the give of leather under my cheek in result. I’m lying on a couch. A plush couch that smells faintly like a dog.

My mother’s been a veterinarian all my life. I recognize the comforting reek. I’m almost certain I’m not making it up to comfort myself, though.

Still, as if the recognition itself is a summoning spell, barking explodes from somewhere beyond the room I’m in. The sound reverberates through walls and my tender, overtaxed nerve endings.

I flinch so hard I almost fall off the sofa.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Think, I urge myself.

I press my palms flat against the leather and push myself upright. The room sways, tilts, then steadies at last. My mouth is cottoned and sour. My wrists are raw—the zip ties are gone, but the evidence of them remains in twin bands of thin abraded skin, soon to be mottled with bruises. My brain buzzes when I try to piece together how the hell I wound up in this outfit. I look like I belong wrapped around a stripper’s pole.

Oh, God.

No. No, no, no. Am I in a—?

Wildly, I look around.

That’s when I realize it.

A church. I’m in a church? My mind reels. But it can’t change what my eyes are taking in. This is a church, for sure. Maybe even one that isn’t in regular use. Its bones are evident: the vaulted ceilings, the stone, the soaring upper windows where the ghosts of stained glass still cling to the frames in fragments of cobalt and amber and deep, ecclesiastical red. It takes several seconds to understand that the space has been repurposed. It isn’t abandoned; it’s been converted into a living space of some type.

The couch I’m on is flanked by bookshelves—tall, dark, floor-to-ceiling—stuffed with volumes that look old and imposing. There’s a rug beneath me. Thick, expensive. The kind of rug that has no business being on a church floor but has clearly been here long enough to settle in.

None of this makes sense. I’m not a Christian. I’m not religious at all—I’m a scientist, a biologist, a woman who teaches cellular respiration to teenagers and deals in mitochondria and metabolic pathways and observable, testable, reproducible phenomena. I do not wake up in churches. I do not get auctioned off in glass chambers. I do not get drugged and transported and deposited on leather couches in converted houses of worship.

This is a dream. It has to be a dream. A horrific, substance-fueled, neurological event triggered by whatever they injected into my neck on that street in Jamaica Plain. That’s the logical explanation. That is the Occam’s razor of this situation: I am dreaming, and I will wake up, and I will be in my apartment, and my wrists won’t hurt, and the curry will be in the fridge where it belongs.

Except my wrists throb with pain that isn’t imagined. It’s as real as the chill of the stone floor against my bare feet when I swing my legs off the couch is real.

The dogs are still barking. Closer now. Behind a door somewhere. Two distinct voices—one deeper, one slightly sharper—both losing their minds over something. Over me, maybe. I’m an intruder in their space.

Shuddering, trying to get a hold on breaths that fly with my skyrocketing terror, I pull my knees up to my chest on the couch and wrap my arms around them, making myself as small as the body I live in allows. My hair is tangled. My braid is gone. Whichever vile animal handled me must have pulled it loose at some point, so that now my hair hangs around my face in a dark curtain that I don’t push back because it feels, absurdly, like the only shield I have.

It isn’t enough. I know it the moment the door opens.

The barking crescendos for a split second before it’s muffled again by the door closing. Heavy footsteps thud against the stone floor.

And then there he is. He has to be the one who took me.

He’s tall. That’s what registers, first and foremost. He is tall and has a lean, angular frame. His hair is buzzed to a layer of stubble misting his skull, to an inexplicably dangerous effect. His sharp, serpentine cheekbones don’t help the aura—or do, depending on how one chooses to perceive his intent. Somehow, what disturbs me most is that his eyes are almost the same color as mine, except flatter.

It feels outrageous that he’s wearing a muscle tee. I don’t even watch thrillers, which is painfully ironic since I appear to be starring in one right now, but I almost expect for my abductor to be in a well-pressed suit and a pair of Italian loafers to match. Meanwhile, the tattoos that his arms are covered in—wrist to shoulder, both of them—are much more apt.

He isn’t a dream.

I’d never dream up someone like him.

He is nothing I could conjure.

“Wh—Who are you?” I choke.

Chapter 5 - Leonid

I’ve spent hours staring at the photograph on my phone, comparing it to the flesh-and-blood version of the woman lying unconscious on the couch. Despite what I can garner about what she went through to wind up in that converted-warehouse, it’s striking how different a human being in motion can be from a captured still of them in a suspended moment in time.

The woman in the photograph had looked like someone with great pride and dignity. She had a carriage that radiated confidence. The eyes in that picture cut through the screen with a glossy, overt intelligence.

When I confront the woman on my couch, conscious at last, she’s nothing but a ball of terror. It radiates from her very pores. Her eyes are full of it, though they are no longer dazed and glassy.