Chapter 5 - Quinn
I wake up slowly. Not the peaceful kind of waking where birds are chirping and the sun kisses your face like you’re the main character in a Netflix rom-com. No. This is the kind of waking where your brain boots up in chunks, and every piece that comes online feels like it brought a shovel to bury you in anxiety.
My head is pounding, my mouth’s dry, and my ankle itches where the cuff is still locked tight. The chain clinks every time I shift, reminding me I didn’t dream this up, no matter how hard I want to convince myself otherwise.
I’m still in the ridiculous sheer black gown, the one that looks like I lost a bet with a seductive witch and she sent me to prom in lingerie. My hair’s spread out across the pillow in waves, the bright red strands catching the firelight and making me look more dramatic than I feel. Which is saying something, because I currently feel like I’m five seconds away from a full-blown breakdown.
I stare up at the ceiling. Stone arches and dark beams, just as I described them in Chapter Twelve when Kieran walked into the war room and threw Damien across the table for speaking out of turn.
Right. Damien. That’s the last thing I wrote before all this. The betrayal. The sentencing. The part where Kieran finally turned on him after stringing readers along for eighteen chapters of slow-burning suspicion and razor-sharp tension.
I remember being so smug about it. Clicking the period at the end of Damien’s final monologue like it was a goddamn mic drop.
And now I’m here. In this world I created. Inside a book I haven’t even finished. Which means—
“Oh my God,” I whisper, dragging both hands down my face as realization dawns, slow and brutal. “I have no idea what happens next.”
I didn’t write it. I had plans, sure. Vague ones. Kieran was going to kill Damien. The brothers were going to splinter. There was going to be a power grab, maybe some kind of betrayal arc with the East Ridge pack, a brutal war scene to cap it all off.
But I never figured out the details. I never decided who lived or who died. The ending wasn’t written. I was too busy getting high off the delicious mess of it all. The plotting. The danger. The morally grey chaos. I never stopped to think about the consequences of throwing a hundred loaded guns into a story and letting the characters pick who fires first.
And now I’m in it.
I roll onto my side, the chain tugging gently as I move, and press my face into the pillow, groaning into the fabric like it can absorb my shame. This is worse than any deadline panic. Worse than being ghosted by my agent mid-pitch season. Worse than the time I accidentally sent an entire scene of unedited smut to my editor with the subject line: “Too much blood???”
I’m in a half-finished book surrounded by half-finished characters and a feral Alpha whose mating bond just decided I belong to him. Which would be bad enough if I hadn’t written his entire personality around the idea that he doesn’t get what he wants. I made him brutal. Cold. Designed him to break readers’ hearts. Now he looks at me like I’m the answer to a question I never gave him permission to ask.
Worse—he feels it. The bond. So do I.
I don’t know if I want to scream or cry or just roll myself into a blanket burrito and wait for the plot to come kill me. None of those feel like real options, though, not when I’m chained to a bed in a crime fortress ruled by wolves with control issues and trauma backstories I still haven’t fleshed out.
And then, like clockwork, my thoughts land on the other two disasters I haven’t met yet.
Kieran’s brothers.
Killian and Kellan Volkov.
The heirs of the Volkov syndicate. The ones who survived the bloodbath with Kieran and helped rebuild the empire brick by brutal brick. Kellan’s the calm one. The clean one. He’s all cold strategy and surgical cruelty, with a taste for order and an ego polished to a shine. I can almost handle Kellan. He’s not the problem.
No, the problem is the other one. The volatile one. The one with too many weapons and not enough patience.
Trigger-happy, rage-fueled, loyalty-obsessed Killian. The baby of the Volkov trio, though he’d gut you for calling him that. He’s the kind of character who shoots first, second, and third, and maybe asks questions if there’s still a pulse left to answer.
I didn’t give him a soft side. I didn’t write him a redemption arc. I didn’t even give him a love interest. He was always meant to be pure chaos—a grenade in human form, kept barely in check by Kieran’s authority.
And now I’m supposed to meet him. Probably soon.
My stomach twists.
I don’t know how he’s going to react to me. I know what he should do, what I would have written for him: glare, threaten, pace the room like a loaded weapon and demand Kieran kill me on sight. But now that I’m here, now that the story’s unspooling in real time, I don’t know how much of that still holds.
The characters feel like themselves, sure, but also more alive in ways I didn’t account for. And if Killian decides I’m a threat, and let’s be honest, he will, then I’m screwed.
I try to imagine it. His voice. His fury. The accusations. He’ll demand answers I don’t have. He’ll want to know where I came from, who sent me, why I smell like fate and Omega and things that don’t make sense. I’ll stammer, lie badly, maybe throw in a joke if I’m not too terrified, and he’ll just stare at me like he’s picturing my head on a spike.
I wrote him as a weapon. And now I’m locked in his house.
“Great,” I mutter into the pillow, voice muffled. “I’m going to get shot by my own side character. Perfect. Just what every author dreams of.”
The door creaks slightly down the hall, too far to be opening into this room, but close enough to jolt my nerves. I sit up, tugging the gown into place, heart climbing back into my throat like it’s training for a marathon.
If it’s Kieran, I can handle it—barely. But if it’s Killian? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if he’ll talk or just draw a blade and test how far the bond can stretch before it snaps.
I press a hand to my chest, feel the thrum beneath my skin where the bond still simmers. Quiet. Present. Like something watching me from the inside. I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t know how to fix this.
But I do know one thing with absolute certainty:
I need to survive long enough to rewrite the goddamn ending.