fall into a predictable routine and take on a surreal quality. Before I know it, the days slip into weeks and the weeks into months.
Every morning when I wake, every night before I go to bed, Ash is in my head, sending me messages of encouragement and letting me know about the search. Each time he opens the mate bond, my back tattoo tingles warmly, comforting me.
I love you.
Don’t give up. I’ll find you.
We’ve searched Kilkenny Keep and the grounds. There’s no sign of foul play.
We’ve been to Elle’s school several times. Something keeps calling me back there even though there’s no trace of you.
I’ll never stop looking. I’ll scour every plane if I have to.
I continue to try to answer him back with nothing but a splitting headache to show for it. Using the bond to contact him has proven pointless.
I was captured at the absolute worst possible time. With failing to prove my worthiness at the hunt, Kyoko’s campaigning hard against me, and with no chance to explain the online assaults on my marriage and character—I failed to gain any ground in proving myself to the other council members. Even worse, I probably lost considerable ground with Edmund, who no doubt questions my judgment after I accidentally trashed his office when killing Thane.
And the worst part of all—I was unknowingly pregnant with twins, and now my babies are in danger. This pregnancy should be a dream come true, but it’s morphed into a nightmare. I should be with Ash ruling Avalon and our Earthside territory. Instead, he’s carrying that weight by himself, and I’m stuck here on my own. I long to be in his arms. My brain and my body miss him so much.
I often think about the night I believe the babies were conceived—the night we played strip poker and I embraced Archer as part of our marriage. It’s not lost on me that it’s only when I fully accepted all of Ash that I was able to get pregnant. With my fertility issues, it’s a miracle he got me pregnant at all, let alone with twins.
The first trimester of my pregnancy has been challenging—even if you don’t count the forced imprisonment. I’m constantly exhausted. Even though I sleep the whole night through, I still nap during the day. Growing two babies really takes it out of you.
And whoever called it morning sickness is a dirty liar—it’s really morning, noon and night sickness. Through trial and error, I’ve found that never letting myself get too hungry and eating almost all the time helps with the bouts of nausea.
My appetite is voracious. I attribute this to having a part of Ash inside me—his dragon babies are demanding large quantities of food. While the smell of eggs turns my stomach, everything else is fair game. I can eat two bagels for breakfast, an entire pizza for lunch and steak and potatoes for dinner with snacks in between. The guards don’t limit my food. It’s as if they’re fattening up a cow for slaughter, but I choose to ignore that. I focus on keeping my babies healthy one day at a time.
I have regular ultrasounds—no longer internal, thankfully—and the twins are growing right on schedule. At twelve weeks, they’re each now the size of a plum. My boobs are growing at the same rate, if not faster, than my belly, and I wish Ash was able to see both. My waist went from a general thickening to a cute little bump that I can’t keep my hands off of. I love to rub it when I’m awake and cover it protectively with my arms when I fall asleep at night.
Although my bedroom door is never locked, I spent the initial weeks of my captivity alone in my room, resting and thinking of ways to break out.
Even though the nausea still lingers, I’ve started walking the hallways looking for the portal to get in and out of here that Elle mentioned. At first, the guards followed me, but they soon stopped, probably because they know there’s no way for me to escape.
The hallways down here are a convoluted labyrinth—some circle back to the common room, while others meander long distances only to end up in a dead end. When I backtrack from a dead end, the hallway looks completely different. Elle must have placed some kind of illusion spell on them.
Each time I walk the halls, I feather out my magic to locate a break in the concrete and find the portal. I also leave a mark in each of the corridors I search. But even though I emit only the tiniest amount of energy, it still bounces off the walls and ends up smacking me around. I often return from these missions bruised and battered.
I need to find a way to get outside the walls of the school, even if it’s only a short burst of freedom. There is nothing I can do from the inside. There are no windows in the subbasement that I can break to sneak out of, and because of the binding curse, I can’t take a chance on using my power to smash down a wall. Finding that portal is the only way out.
When I’m not searching for the portal, I’m getting to know the other girls who are being held down here. By day, we all dress in the same black leggings, gray sweatshirts and canvas sneakers, and by night, white cotton nightgowns—our prison uniform.
We sit in the common room and talk for hours because there isn’t much else to do. There’s no TV, but there are some board games and cards. There are also no phones, clocks or calendars. If not for my ultrasounds where Elle, Franco and the doctor discuss how far along I am, it would be difficult to mark the passage of time.
The other girls are younger than me, and as humans, are certainly less powerful. They come from all over Earthside, picked up off the street and trafficked—sold like chattel and purchased by predators like Franco Rossi.
The girls have complicated stories but all have one thing in common—ending up here is the latest in a long line of bad luck.
Jackie, with her stick-straight blond hair and sunny smile, was kicked out of her upper-middle-class house for being gay. Her parents are very strict, and when Jackie failed to live up to their expectations, they cut her off completely—no money, no car, and no place to live. It was a similar situation for Christine, except she’s trans.
Luna was a drug addict who got picked up in a raid on a trap house. Her parents also had drug problems, and a life of hopelessness was the only one Luna even knew.
Ruby battled mental illness and got stuck in a vicious cycle she couldn’t break free of. She couldn’t afford her medication because she couldn’t hold down a steady job. She couldn’t hold down a steady job because she couldn’t afford her medication.
Martina’s family was poor and lived in their car when they couldn’t find affordable housing. She started stripping and then moved into prostitution to help make ends meet for her family.
Winnie, an Indigenous girl from Canada, ended up in the foster system when her family was killed in a house fire. She ran away when her foster father tried to get in the shower with her and ended up out on the streets.
Carina was separated from her family of migrant workers when they came to a new country to make a better life.
Sade’s boyfriend beat the shit out of her whenever he got drunk. One day, he kicked her out of their apartment, threw all her things out the window and told her to get lost or he’d kill her.
There are more girls and more stories, but they’re all variations on the same themes—poverty, abuse and neglect. Hearing their life stories breaks my heart and galvanizes my resolve to figure a way out of this for all of us. These girls are on the fringes of society, and nobody is looking out for them, protecting them. If staying alive is job one, then rescuing these girls is job two. I encourage them not to give up, as Ash keeps telling me.
Once in a while, a girl disappears in the middle of the night with no explanation. When that happens, it scares us all, and I have to reassure the girls it’s going to be okay and tell them we have to stay positive.
This afternoon, Danny, the girl with the black face tattoos, joins us in the subbasement. It’s just her and I in the dining room. Everyone has already finished lunch and left to play cards.
“I see what you’re doing. Stop giving them false hope,” Danny says, pushing back from the table. “No one is coming to save us. No one knows we’re here. The girls upstairs think we’ve all run away or graduated. That Elle has found us a job on the outside. When in reality, it’s obvious to me now that most, if not all the girls, will end up down here at some point.”
I peek over my shoulder at the guard standing at the entrance to the room. He’s wearing a bored expression and doesn’t seem to be paying attention to us. “I’m going to find a way out of this. For all of us,” I whisper. “There are powerful people looking for me. People that won’t stop until I’m found. And I’m not going to leave any of you behind. I’m not going to forget about you.”
“You can’t make those promises. You’re stuck down here as much as we are.” Danny’s tone is bitter with the first-hand knowledge that bad things do happen to good people.
“You’re under my protection now. I’ll find a way. I give you my word.” I place my hand on top of hers on the table.
She yanks her hand away. “Save it for someone who believes in happy endings.”
