Moonlit Chains, Book One of THE DARK VOWS TRILOGY

“At night, even the smallest noise felt like betrayal. A pebble skittered from under her heel; the contents of her book bag jostled as she hitched the strap of it higher to keep the frayed edge from further digging into her already sore and tender shoulder. Rubbed raw by the friction of the miles upon miles of walking she just endured. Dry grass rasped along the road's shoulder, whispering like it knew secrets and would trade them for blood. Even her breath felt measured out, as if her lungs were counting the distance between the house she'd fled and the place she hadn't yet found. The highway unfurled through the desert, a cracked ribbon under a bowl of ink and ground glass. Stars crowded close and far at once. The moon was a coin stuck in a cloud's teeth. Heat left behind at dusk and had collapsed into a brittle chill that crawled the sand and licked her ankles. Her shoes, once white, were now gray with miles. Thin soles let each chip of gravel telegraph its message up her bones. She listened for engines and didn't hear them. She listened for voices and got wind. Behind her, the dark opened like a mouth swallowing the last smear of city glow. She tried not to think of the marble hall that smelled of lemon oil and jasmine papered-over rot. Of doors that locked from the outside. Of a man who asked her to sign things as if love were a signature. Of her mother's hands, shaking, placing a pen where a knife should have been. There had been a photo clipped to the front page of the contract: a beautiful man with winter in his eyes and a smile like a broken bottle. The son of a tycoon, her father had said. The solution. She had laughed at the word. It was brittle, wrong, and tasted of pennies. ‘You'll do as you're told’, he'd murmured, studying her like a dog that refused to learn a trick. Her ribs remembered the press of that gaze. She filled them with dust and kept walking. The desert wasn't quiet. People who said so hadn't been alone in it. Crickets scraped a sawtooth rhythm in the scrub. An owl slipped overhead, its shadow laying a dark stripe across the road. A coyote called, lonely but unafraid. When the wind turned, it brought metal and creosote and the old, sour ghost of gasoline. Close, she thought. Civilization, or a place that pretends. Her hand found the locket at her throat without asking permission: old green glass in dull silver, a pressed dusk-colored flower caught under the thin lens, a thread snipped from a shawl that had always smelled of chamomile and rain. Eleanor, she thought, and the name warmed and hurt. The lullaby flickered, the one with a river for a melody, scraped and thin in memory now, but the cadence lived beneath her ribs like a second pulse. ‘Run if I tell you to’, her mother had whispered once. So long ago it felt more like a dream than a memory. Her eyes bright with a kind of knowing Aveline hadn't understood than. ‘Promise, little bird?’ She had promised. And ran she did. The road tilted. A weak seam of light bled over the horizon. Not city-bright. Flicker-bright. She lengthened her stride, the ache falling to the background. "People," she rasped, to prove her voice still worked. A town grew out of shadow, not new, not dead. Weathered fronts with hand-painted signs gone ghostly. A false balcony held up by tired posts. A barber pole that had stopped pretending. A mailbox bent back like something impatient had yanked it. There was stubbornness here, clinging like lichen: a pot of half-dead petunias; a new padlock on an old shed; a poster tacked to a pole in careful block letters: Bingo Night- Fridays, 7 PM with a doodled paw print in the corner. The diner was chrome with a neon script sign missing letters so it read B-ty's. A Closed sign hung crooked in the window. Upside-down coffee cups lined a shelf, rims catching what little light there was. She peered into the refection of the glass to a stranger looking back at her. Split lip, eyes blacked, face hallowed and shadowed, hair matted at the nape, a seam torn like paper along the sleeve of her zip up hoodie. She forced herself to turn and walk away. The gas station next door crouched like a wary animal. Pumps chained, a bell-line still strung to ding for cars that didn't come. No Entrance After Dark, warned one sign; another, hand-scrawled, added: We Mean It. Music found her then. Low, stubborn. A bass like a heartbeat. It dragged a line from her to the edge of town, where the place stopped pretending to be modern and settled into what it had always been: wood, dust, and people too stubborn to leave. She followed past a feed store where a black bull six feet high stared down a sun it couldn't see, past a dentist's office that had probably seen more bar fights than cavities, past an alley that smelled of beer, onions, and boiled regret. The sound came from a building squatting at the town's seam, as if the town tolerated it but didn't claim it. Neon sputtered in mismatched letters: THE SPUR. The S flickered like a pulse. Motorcycles lined the front like sleeping beasts, chrome catching any light as if hunger were reflective. Helmets hung from hooks. A pair of boots sat on the stoop, toes pointed outward, like their owner had stepped out and been claimed by the dark. She reached for the door. Her palm hovered over the handle, heat leaking through old metal. Someone had chalked a sigil on the jamb, just a swirl and a crossbar, nothing she recognized-and the locket warmed under her fingers as if it had its own opinions about it. The air smelled of cigarettes ground into wood, whiskey's acid breath, fry oil, leather, sweat, and something sweeter and metallic that made the back of her tongue ripple. She told her hand to stop shaking. It didn't. She pushed the door anyway. The wood gave with a sticky reluctance, as if it wanted her to know she was the one insisting. Heat hit first. The particular bar heat that belongs to too many bodies and too little air. The room gathered itself: a long wooden bar stained darker where a thousand forearms had rested; a back wall crowded with bottles, labels frayed by hands; a mirror cracked in one corner but silver enough to throw the room back at itself; tables scattered and scarred with initials and dates; a pool table whose felt had been green once; a jukebox that looked like it should be retired but refused. A staircase climbed at the back to a door marked PRIVATE. A carved wooden wolf, no bigger than a boy's fist, sat on a shelf beside the stairs. A simple thing, clumsy and cherished, one ear chipped, belly rubbed glossy by luck-seeking thumbs. People turned as one animal might. Not all men, but mostly. Big shoulders. Thick wrists. Ink crawling like maps. Boots with heels beveled by use. Heads tilted. She'd been looked at, measured, weighed, found convenient, but not like this. Not like the room itself had inhaled and decided not to exhale until it understood which way she'd fall. The jukebox didn't stop. It shifted songs, the kind with a steel guitar and a moon it didn't say out loud. Conversations eased into low currents again, but not far. She went to the bar because that's where decisions live. The man behind it wiped a glass with a towel that had lost its war with stains a decade ago. Older than most by a decade or two. Hair iron-gray over a face that had practiced both laughing and warning. Forearms corded and sun-browned; the faded out ink of a swallow; a white thread of scar tracing his wrist bone. "What'll it be?" he asked, voice gravel under tires. He didn't stare; he read. The read softened something in his tone. "Water? Beer? Something warm?" "Water," she said, and the word cracked like ice. "Please." He reached for a clean glass from a higher shelf, the kind you keep for true guests, and filled it from a tap that ran cold and sweet. He set it on a coaster advertising a beer she had never heard of. In its surface: her, ghosted-smudged cheek, split lip, hair in knots, the green locket lying against bruised skin like a small pond holding moonlight. She drank half too fast, the cold punched her throat. The glass wobbled. His hand steadied it with two fingers, not touching hers. "You from around here?" he asked as if it could be true, offering her a gentler lie to stand behind. "Just passing through." The water went down like something she would remember as mercy. "Uh-huh." He tipped his chin. "Name's Patrick." He didn't ask for hers. "You need food. Eggs and toast I can promise; stew I can nearly recommend." "Eggs..." The word had gravity. "Thank you." "Sit," he said, not a command, a permission, and flicked two fingers toward a corner. "Gus, play something the moon won't sue us for." Someone snorted. The song softened. Dice clicked again. A low, unthreatening hum came back like a tide turning. She sat, her legs admitting at last that they were tired. She pressed the rim of the glass to her mouth and counted the details because numbers behaved. Twenty-four tall bottles, seven squat, three with labels scribbled out. A dent along the pool rail where a boot had rested through years of slow games. A groove on the table nearest the door where a pocketknife had argued with varnish. A hat hung by the stairs marked PRIVATE; the stair treads dipped in the middle from old feet and recent ones. The carved wolf's smooth belly. The chalk smear of a child's hand along the baseboard there, as if someone small had been scolded and adored in equal measure. "Bread first," Patrick said, sliding a plate: two slices toast, butter softening into shine. "You'll forgive bread faster than everything." "Patrick," a voice from down the bar drawled, lazy as a cat in a sunny window. "You're feeding strays again." The line could have bitten, it didn't. It landed like ritual-tease plus test. She didn't turn. Training said don't, and she honored the parts of herself that had kept her breathing this long. Patrick didn't glance over either. "You want to complain, Duke?" he said mildly. "Come do it where the cook can throw a spoon at you." Duke. The name landed, not on her ears so much as on the room. A subtle settling. She buttered the toast. The knife clicked once. The first bite tasted like a safe morning you didn't have to apologize to. The door opened. The temperature nudged down, air thinned. The room leaned a fraction in an old habit. People say you can feel when certain men arrive, she had called that superstition. Hair lifted along her arms. A scent moved through the rest, cooler, cleaner, a thread of wet stone and pine and something bright-metallic that had teased her at the threshold. She didn't look at the door. The mirror did that for her, cracked corner splintering faces into shards. A group entered and the bar reoriented like a murmuration when the lead bird tilts. They headed to the end of the bar to the man that had spoken before. Finally allowing herself to steal a glance at him as he stood to greet his companions. The man couldn’t have been older than mid to late twenties. Wearing a plain dark jacket that knew weather, a white shirt, jeans. No patches, no marks. His hair was dark and had clearly argued with his hands. His mouth looked like a blade you should not set your thumb on. Even warped by the crack, his eyes were the wrong color for this dim place. Golden Amber. They held light as if glass were behind them. He said something quiet to the men that walked up to him and they peeled off to the edges that had been theirs before she arrived. He walked to the bar, not directly to her but close enough to change the air pressure. Patrick placed a glass between them the way a man places a buffer between magnets he respects and doesn't entirely trust. "You picked a hell of a place to stop," the man said looking at Patrick, not to her, and the room listened. "She needed water," Patrick said. "They always do," he answered, and she felt his attention turn toward her without his head moving. That shift was a weather change, not a curiosity. "You're hurt." Her chin lifted because letting it fall would break something she wouldn't fix in public. "I'm fine." Patrick made a sound that said you're not but you will be. "She'll be finer with eggs." “Kitchen’s open?" the man, Duke, asked. "It is for me," Patrick said, already turning. "And for anyone who walks in bleeding kindness they didn't expect to get." Duke's mouth twitched, not quite forgiving the idea of a smile. He lifted his glass. Up close, the white nick along his wrist said some blade had once died disappointed. That wild-metal scent clung to him, not like cologne but like a weather front. "You running?" he asked then, not unkind, not performative. From something. "Yes." The word had to cover too much. From who would break her open. From what would make it real again. "From who?" He didn't crowd it. He set the question down where she could push it back toward him if she wanted it held. "Duke," Patrick warned from the kitchen doorway, the word worn smooth by long friendship. A lighter voice behind him said crisply, "If you move your arm again, I'm sewing it to your shirt." The voice belonged to a woman in rolled sleeves with her graying hair knotted back and eyes that filed and fixed things. "I'm not asking for sport," Duke said, without looking away. Lies crouched on her tongue. Boyfriend, Bad luck. The photograph rose-the winter eyes. The contract's seal. Her father's hand guiding hers. The name Eleanor had written in red on an envelope she never mailed. "My family," she said, and the plate-edges of the words showed. "And someone else." "Did they follow you?" "I don't know." She'd learned not to turn around too often. Prey signaled that way. He nodded once. A piece set on a board no one else could see. "Eat," he said. "Then we'll see about where you sleep." "You don't have-" Patrick arrived with a plate: eggs bright as a promise, more toast shining with surrendering butter, a bowl of stew sitting off to the side like a friend pretending it just happened to be here. "Two bites now," he said, "and more when your hands calm down." At the far end, a lanky boy, barely a man, with a grin too big for his face, a dimple denting one cheek-balanced three glasses on one hand and wiggled his fingers at her like ta-da. He almost slipped, recovered with a flourish, catching Patrick's side-eye and sobered theatrically. "I'm a professional, boss," he stage-whispered. "Rowan," the old woman snapped from the kitchen, "if you bleed in my clean sink, I'm charging you by the drop." "Noted," he chirped, and mouthed welcome at Aveline before zipping off again. By the door, a mountain of a man in a denim jacket adjusted a hinge with careful fingers. He glanced her way once, eyes the soft gray of weather-worn wood, and gave her a nod that wasn't permission or threat, just I see you. “That’s Calen,” Patrick began “helpful but very flirtatious that one, so be careful.” Aveline was too weak to laugh. On a stool near the end, a man with a pale scar cutting his eyebrow watched her the way a snake watches a field, still, patient. When Patrick said Duke, scar-brow's mouth twitched. He set his glass down without drinking. "You've got a room upstairs," Patrick said to Aveline, as if he'd always intended it. "Cot, clean sheets. One night. Wash glasses in the morning to make me believe in humanity.” Relief punched her knees. She gripped the bar to pretend she was only adjusting her seat. "Thank you." "You can thank me by not bringing a posse," Patrick said. "Finish the water. Then we go up." She lifted the glass. Her hands had steadied enough to make a small ring of quiet on the wood when she set it down. "Who sent you here?" Duke asked. Not suspicion. Not kindness. Something that included both. "No one," she said, and hated how small that sounded. "I saw the light." He studied her one heartbeat longer. Deciding if the room could carry what she brought. He nodded, decision landing like a coin put under a thumb. "You're swaying," he said. "Finish the eggs." She wanted to show him she wasn't. That she could run farther, that she would never again ask a stranger for anything. Defiance flared, was recognized, and went out like a match in wind. She swallowed egg, bread, warmth and the world softened at the edges. A radio somewhere behind the bar crackled briefly, hissed, caught a fragment of a dispatcher's voice: "...east road closed... border patrol... broken...," then went to static. Scar-brow's eyes cut toward it; his mouth flattened. A chair leg scuffed. Dice clattered like rain. The locket warmed and cooled under her fingers as if it had its own weather. The chalk-sigil on the doorframe pricked the edges of her thoughts. The carved wolf gleamed with palm-gloss. The air tugged at her hair and brought the metallic-sweet back, brighter now. "Easy," Patrick said, gentler. She set the fork down without meaning to. Her fingers hummed. The floor shifted a fraction, like standing on a boat and someone moved. The lantern light fuzzed and snapped back; the room breathed and she couldn't keep pace. Her heartbeat climbed into her throat. The bruise under her ribs sent up a red flare. Hot. Cold. Both. "Patrick," The old woman said, nearer, the voice that files and fixes. She leaned from the kitchen, sleeves shoved up, eyes already diagnosing. "She's going over." "I've got her," Patrick said, but he was two steps away. Duke was one. He set his glass down soft, a click she would remember because ordinary sounds are the last things you take with you. He turned to her fully and the room's focus decided to be his problem instead of its own. He didn't touch her yet. He didn't need to. His voice reached her first. "Hey," he said, calibrated to her exact dark. "Look at me." She did. His face steadied where the room didn't. The lines bracketing his mouth hadn't been carved by laughter. His eyes weren't a color so much as intent holding light. Up close he carried that metal-in-pine line of scent as if it lived in him. It made no sense. None of this did. "Don't-" she said, and couldn't finish which don't she meant-don't touch me; don't let me fall; don't let me go; don't see me; don't leave. "You're safe," he said, eyes softened, the words heavy like a promise he'd kept enough to know how to say it. "I've got you." She stood to prove she didn't need him. The chair scraped. The plate jumped. The room finally tilted for real. Her knees failed their test. Her hands forgot their job. The world took a step away. He caught her. Not rough. Not delicate. Certain. His jacket smelled of old smoke and rain caught in wool and a wildness she didn't have a name for. Heat bled through denim and into her. Her cheek found the place under his collarbone. Something low in him rumble, not voice, and it moved through her like it had a map of her bones. "Doc," he said, and the bar converted from audience to machine. The mountain by the door, Calen, was suddenly at the foot of the stairs, clearing space with two fingers. The lanky boy, Rowan, was there without being in the way, grabbing the bannister rag from its hook like an offering. Scar-brow slid off his stool, not to help, just to see the chaos. Patrick moved ahead, the PRIVATE door already open. "Upstairs," Doc said briskly. "Watch the third stair. It bites." He lifted her like a thing that didn't embarrass him to carry. Pride flared and failed. She gripped the locket. The green glass glowed faintly against her palm and went cool again like a breath answering a breath. As the stairs rose and the room dropped, she caught the mirror's cracked corner throwing a dozen versions of the moment back at her-her falling, him catching; Calen making space; Rowan with his ridiculous rag and earnest face; Patrick's hand on the banister where the varnish had worn away to the wood; the carved wolf glinting under lamplight; scar-brow's stillness, watchful as winter. Her last clear thought was tired and unkind to herself: she had run as far and as hard as she could and still, like too many women on too many roads, ended inside the circle of someone else's arms. Her last clear sensation was the pound of his heart, steady, sovereign, unafraid, and, under everything she'd sworn and promised herself, the treacherous, undeniable spark of attraction, sharp as a struck match in a dark room. "Got you," Duke said again, quiet enough that maybe it was only for her. The dark closed like a hand. From one cage into another, she thought, and went.