Kidnapped
1109 Words
FARAH
Consciousness comes back in pieces.
First the cold, then the pain behind my eyes, then the sensation of movement—rough hands gripping my arms, my feet dragging across ground I can’t see properly. Trees blur past in my periphery, dense and dark, and it takes me longer than it should to understand that I’m being carried through a forest in the middle of the night by people I don’t know.
I try to move my legs and they respond like they belong to someone else.
I’ve been drugged.
The realization settles through the fog with grim clarity. I remember the window exploding inward, hands closing around me before I could draw breath to scream, and then nothing—a void that ends here, in the cold and the dark, with my arms wrenched back and the trees moving past me like a nightmare I can’t wake from.
“She’s waking up.” A rough voice, somewhere to my left. “Should we knock her out again?”
“No.” This voice is different—smoother, carrying the particular weight of someone accustomed to being obeyed. “I want her conscious. Let her see where we’re taking her.”
***
The clearing opens up without warning, and what’s waiting inside it makes my stomach drop.
A dozen people at least, arranged in a loose circle, all of them watching me arrive with the same cold, measuring attention. They move aside as we enter, and in the center of the space stands a man who needs no introduction—tall and lean, silver threading through dark hair, his face mapped with scars that speak to a long and violent life. He looks at me the way someone looks at something they’ve been waiting a long time to see.
His smile doesn’t reach anything behind his eyes.
“So this is the famous Serapha,” he says, and begins to circle me slowly. The men holding my arms keep me upright while he moves, unhurried, like I’m something he’s considering purchasing. “The king’s precious mate. The one he’s been guarding so desperately.” He crouches down until we’re level, forcing my eyes to meet his. “Do you know what you are? Do you know what sleeps inside you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “I’m nobody. Please, just let me—”
His laugh is sharp and short, and the wolves around him echo it in a way that makes my skin crawl. He stands, the amusement fading into something more purposeful.
“Nobody. You’re the key to destroying the most powerful Alpha in this territory, and you don’t even remember it.” He tilts his head, something almost like pity crossing his scarred face. “What a waste you are right now.”
He turns to address his pack, and his voice takes on the cadence of someone who has rehearsed this.
“Caspian believes he can break his curse by keeping her close—studying her, finding a loophole, using her like a tool he can control.
What he doesn’t understand is that she doesn’t need to remember anything to fulfill her purpose. The Moon Goddess built her to destroy him. It lives in her nature like a splinter.”
He pauses, his smile turning cruel.
“But it’s so much more satisfying when they understand what they’ve done.”
A gesture from his hand, and the wolves part.
The figure that steps out of the shadows moves wrong. There’s no other way to describe it—too fluid, too silent, like something that has forgotten how bodies are supposed to work. A dark hooded cloak obscures everything, and even the wolves give it a wide, instinctive berth. Someone near me mutters witch under their breath like a curse.
“Dark magic is forbidden among our kind,” the leader says conversationally, watching my face. “The old laws are clear on this. But I find laws remarkably flexible when Caspian Thorne’s destruction is the alternative.” His eyes settle on mine. “And I am very desperate to see him brought to his knees.”
The witch moves toward me, and I feel it before she arrives—something ancient and deeply wrong radiating outward, pressing against my skin like heat from a wound. I try to pull back, and the hands gripping me tighten until I go still.
“No—please—”
“The barriers in your mind are strong.” The witch’s voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, neither male nor female, just a whisper that seems to live in the air itself. “Built by the Moon Goddess to protect you from your own past. Breaking them will take time.”
A pause.
“And it will hurt.”
A pale hand emerges from the cloak, fingers tipped with blackened nails, and presses flat against my forehead.
The pain is instantaneous and total.
It tears through my skull like something with hands, raking at walls I never knew existed, and I hear myself scream from somewhere very far away. Images detonate behind my eyes in fragments—a sword, blood soaking into my palms, blue eyes looking up at me with a betrayal so complete it has no bottom—and then it stops.
All at once.
Like a door slamming shut.
I hang in the grip of the wolves, shaking so hard I can hear my own breathing, ragged in the silence of the clearing.
“The first session,” the witch whispers. “There will be many more. Each one will crack the barriers further.” She steps back, unhurried. “Each one brings you closer to remembering who you truly are.”
The leader nods, satisfied. “Take her to the holding cell. We continue tomorrow.”
They drag me away, and my legs have forgotten entirely how to cooperate. Through the blur of pain and exhaustion, something on one of the men catches my eye—a symbol on his armor, half hidden beneath his cloak. Small. Familiar. The same mark I saw on the guards outside my room in Caspian’s palace.
I stare at it, and the leader follows my gaze and smiles like I’ve given him a gift.
“You’re wondering how we knew exactly when to take you,” he says. “Which window. Which guards to drug first.” He leans close enough that I can see the individual scars on his jaw.
“We have friends everywhere, Serapha. Even in the king’s own house.”
- Writer
