BOUND TO THE AVERNUS FAMILY

Chapter 5: The Attempt

It is day three, and I have a plan.

It is a methodical, perfectly competent plan. I have spent the last forty-eight hours observing the estate's rhythms with clinical precision. I know the night staff rotates at exactly two in the morning. I know there is a four-minute blind spot between the kitchen staff retiring and the perimeter guard completing his eastern circuit.

Most importantly, I know the gate is unlocked.

Everything here is unlocked. The architecture of this prison relies entirely on biological coercion rather than iron bars, which means physically walking out is dangerously simple.

I am wearing soft-soled shoes and dark clothing. At 2:01 AM, I slip out of my second-floor bedroom.

My breathing is perfectly steady. My analytical mind is operating at peak efficiency. The logic is flawless. I am going to walk out.

Execution is simply a matter of timing.

I move through the heavy shadows of the corridor, down the sweeping stone staircase, and across the cavernous entrance hall without making a sound. No alarms trigger. No staff intercepts me.

I push the heavy, unlatched front door open and slip into the cool night air.

I walk quickly down the long, winding drive, keeping to the shadows of the manicured hedges. The towering wrought-iron gates at the perimeter are standing wide open. I step through them without hesitation.

The physical experience of crossing the boundary hits me instantly. It is the exact inverse of my arrival.

The suffocating, metallic density that has been sitting in my lungs for three days vanishes. It is replaced by thin, sharp, ordinary night air. I take a deep, greedy breath of it. I am free.

I make it exactly thirty meters down the dirt road before the poison strikes.

Without the ambient mist of the estate to balance it, the mist already trapped in my bloodstream rapidly cycles into pure, unadulterated toxin. My nervous system short-circuits. My legs simply disconnect from my brain.

I am on the ground before I decide to be on the ground.

My hands shake violently against the gravel as I gasp for air that suddenly feels like inhaling ground glass. The muscular failure is absolute and terrifying.

I am not alone.

I force my heavy head up. Sven Avernus is sitting in the dirt a few feet away. His broad back is resting casually against a wooden fence post.

He isn't towering over me. He isn't physically restraining me. He has folded his massive, six-foot-eight frame into a seated position on the ground beside me. He had been waiting here before I even left the house. He knew.

"You knew," I choke out, my lungs burning with lethal heat.

"Abaddon predicted this," Sven replies quietly, his voice a low rumble in the dark. "He told me to wait where you could see me. Not to stop you. To wait unless you fell."

"You let me make it that far on purpose."

"Yes."

"Why?" I gasp, my vision starting to tunnel at the edges.

Sven considers the question with his specific, terrifying seriousness. "Because you needed to know it was real."

I look at his heavily scarred face. I have calculated my odds correctly. Pride is entirely irrelevant; survival is immediate. I reach out a trembling hand toward him.

He closes the distance instantly. Sven scoops me off the dirt road as easily as if I weighed nothing. His massive hands are incredibly precise, careful not to bruise my failing body as he carries me back through the iron gates.

By the time he pushes open the front doors of the estate, my mist levels have reached Stage Three.

I am convulsing slightly against his broad chest. We are not going to make it up the stairs to a bedroom.

Sven lowers me directly onto the hard, cold marble floor of the entrance hall.

This is not romantic. This is emergency medicine administered with speed and brutal efficiency.

He tears my dark trousers down my legs and hastily drops his own pants. He doesn't bother with foreplay or asking his usual questions about my readiness. My body is already weeping sl*ck, desperate fluids, biologically screaming for the cure to the poison ravaging my veins.

Sven grips my hips, aligning his heavy, rigid size, and sinks his massive c*ck into my tight p*ssy in one long, devastating thrust.

I scream, my back arching off the cold marble floor.

He sets a fast, punishing rhythm. He is driving the heavy, unpurified mist from his own system directly into my core. My tight internal muscles milk his thick length frantically, begging for the chemical exchange.

The intense, freezing wave of mist absorption crashes through my bloodstream, colliding violently with the lethal fever.

I shatter around him, a violent *rgasm ripping through my exhausted body. The stark, silver-blue light projects from my eyes, illuminating the dark entrance hall, bouncing off the sweeping staircase and the high vaulted ceiling above us.

I briefly register the thought that any passing staff member could see us glowing and f*cking in the middle of the foyer.

I note the thought, and then the blinding, oxygen-rich pleasure overrides it completely.

Sven groans—a harsh, guttural sound echoing in the massive space—and unloads a heavy, scorching flood of c*m deep inside me.

He withdraws from my soaking entrance with a wet, heavy sound.

The mist is processed. The fever is broken. My hands are perfectly steady again as they rest flat against the marble floor.

I am lying exactly where I stood three days ago when I first arrived, now intimately familiar with the space from a completely different, obscene angle.

The estate has opinions about my exit strategies, I catalogue dryly, pulling my ruined clothes back up.

Sven adjusts his dark trousers and zips them. He doesn't stand up. He shifts backward and sits with his broad back resting against the cold stone wall of the entrance hall, his long legs stretched out beside me.

I look up at the vaulted ceiling. My mind is still tracking the feeling of his massive, calloused hands carrying me from the dirt road. The sheer precision of them against his structural size is a detail I keep filing incorrectly.

I turn my head on the marble floor to look at him.

"Do people try to leave often?" I ask, my voice echoing slightly in the vast, empty space.

Sven looks down at his large hands, then over at me.

"The last carrier tried twice in the first week," he answers factually.

I process this new data point. There is a history here that I am only just beginning to uncover.

"And after that?" I ask.

A long pause stretches between us. It is the specific Sven quality of taking a question entirely seriously before providing the answer.

"She stopped trying," Sven says quietly.

He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't tell me why.

I look back up at the dark, arched ceiling of the entrance hall. I wonder what finally stopped the previous carrier from trying to walk out those unlocked doors.

I wonder if I actually want to know the answer.