Chapter 2 - Quinn
When I start to wake, it’s not gentle. It’s not the lazy, hazy slide from sleep to consciousness I usually get after a night of too much wine and questionable life choices. No. This is violent.
My skull feels like it’s being cracked open by a jackhammer operated by a spiteful caffeinated god, and every bone in my body is aching like I’ve just been exorcised against my will. The pain is everywhere, pulsing behind my eyes, crawling down my spine, buzzing in my fingertips. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to think.
And then my brain starts catching up.
The ground beneath me isn’t wood. It’s not the creaky, familiar floor of my cluttered little apartment with its coffee stains and crumbs from too many midnight writing sessions. It’s something else entirely. Cold and hard.
I try to move, my fingers dragging across the surface, and it scrapes my skin with all the warmth of a dead cathedral. Stone; smooth in some places, rough in others. Cold enough to make my body curl tighter on instinct.
My mouth tastes like regret. Metallic and bitter and dry, like I’ve been screaming for hours or maybe just swallowed a hundred bad decisions whole.
I try to lift my head and instantly regret it. A low groan escapes before I can stop it, half pain, half protest, all very human and very confused.
And then it hits me.
The dark. Not the cozy kind you get at three a.m. in a shitty apartment where the only light is the blue blink of your Wi-Fi router and the occasional flicker of your neighbor’s TV through the wall.
No, this is a suffocating dark.
I finally manage to push myself up on trembling arms, limbs weak like they’ve been rebooted after too long without use. My muscles scream in protest and my pride screams louder. My head’s still pounding, but my body is moving. That counts as progress, right?
Then something catches my eye—movement. Or lack of it, really.
I look down and gasp.
Gone are my sweatpants. Gone is my favorite hoodie, the one with the wine stain and the hole at the hem I always tell myself I’ll stitch and never do. Instead, I’m wearing a sheer black gown that clings like a second skin and reveals way too much to be practical for… whatever the hell this is.
The neckline is low enough to make me suspicious of my own subconscious. My thighs are mostly exposed. My tits look like they’ve been professionally styled for the cover of a particularly smutty fantasy paperback… one I probably wrote.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter, tugging the fabric up in a futile attempt at decency. “Really? This is how we’re doing this?”
My hands shake as they run over my stomach. It’s flat and toned. My skin is smoother. My nails aremanicured. My hair isn’t up anymore. It’s loose, thick waves of red spilling around my shoulders, falling down my back like it’s been styled for a movie poster.
No frizz. No dry shampoo residue. Just vibrant, glossy volume like some magical glam team did a full makeover while I was unconscious.
And then I notice something else. My body. It feels… wrong. Not painful wrong. Just different. Stronger. Taller, maybe. I look like me, but the best version of me, like someone clicked Enhance and never stopped.
I barely have time to spiral about that before I hear a voice; deep, male, laced with danger and carved from gravel and command.
“She wakes.”
I go completely still. My heart skids and my lungs forget how to function for a second. Because I know that voice. I built that voice. My head snaps toward the sound, and there he is, stepping out of the darkness like a dream I once had and then dragged into a nightmare on purpose.
Kieran Volkov.
Every detail is exactly as I wrote him. No exaggeration. No interpretation. No freedom of reader imagination. Just the walking embodiment of destruction and domination I sculpted in blood and ink over months of plotting.
He’s tall, his frame impossible to ignore; shoulders wide, chest bare and inked with sprawling black tattoos that curl down his ribs, thick with sharp lines and old symbols. His muscles move beneath his skin like tension incarnate, honed and brutal. His hair is long, golden and loose, brushing his shoulders. His eyes—
Shit.
His eyes glow. A low, pulsing red. Not like they reflect light, like they generate it. Like there’s something beneath the surface burning for release. He crouches in front of me, one knee on the stone, elbows resting on his thighs. Studying me like I’m a puzzle he wasn’t expecting to find but now refuses to leave unsolved. His gaze drags across my face, and I feel it like a touch. He smells like smoke and ash and the edge of something primal.
He tilts his head and narrows his eyes. “You smell like a problem,” he says, voice so low it scrapes my bones. “You smell like mine.”
My brain short-circuits. I open my mouth but nothing comes out so I close it and try again. “Okay. Nope. This is a dream. Or a hallucination. Or a side effect of expired cake. Or—”
He leans closer. Too close. His breath ghosts over my skin, hot and dangerous, and everything inside me shifts.
It hits me like a train. Not just heat or adrenaline. Something worse.
The bond.
I know what it is because I wrote it. I described it in obsessive detail in a Google Doc buried three folders deep in my laptop. That moment when a bonded pair recognizes each other and the connection locks in. Not optional. Not avoidable. Not slow.
Instant. Violent. Permanent.
Except I never gave him one. Kieran Volkov was not meant to have a mate. I built him feral. Unlovable. Cursed by design.
And now it’s turning on me.
I stumble back, gasping. My body is reacting to him and I hate it. “No. No, this isn’t… this can’t be real.” I press a hand to my chest, trying to calm the frantic beat of my heart. “I didn’t write this. I didn’t write this.”
His eyes narrow. His lips curl; not into a smile, but something knowing.
The bond pulses again. I feel it thread into me, like a hook set deep and yanked hard. I’m not just in his presence. I’m claimed. And that’s when my body finally short-circuits.
The heat. The fear. The impossible truth of it all.
My vision sways and the last thing I see is Kieran watching me, unblinking.
Then I do the only reasonable thing I can think of.
I pass out cold.