Chapter 15 - Quinn

Chapter 15 - Quinn
It’s been five days.

Five days of stone walls, flickering torches, and silence so loud it has weight.

Five days since he came to taunt me. Since he touched me with that deceptively soft voice and let the bond do its filthy work. Five days since I played him and watched that monster lose control just long enough to prove that even an Alpha like him could be baited.

I thought it would feel like a win.

It doesn’t.

It feels like isolation clawing its way under my skin. Like hunger gnawing at my ribs with sharpened teeth. My lips are cracked. My head pounds from dehydration. And my wrists… my wrists are nothing but swollen bruises wrapped in cold iron.

And still, I wait.

He doesn’t come.

He sends guards. Food. Water. A healer once, who didn't speak a word. But not him.

Kieran fucking Volkov.

It’s petty. It’s childish. It’s exactly the sort of punishment that fits him—disguised as mercy, but crueler than violence. He’s not trying to break my body anymore. He’s letting the bond rot me from the inside out, letting silence and suspense wear me down inch by inch until I’m the one unraveling.

And God help me, it’s working.

By day three, I start talking to the wall.

By day four, I scream at it.

Now, I just lie here.

My body’s curled as much as the cuffs allow, head resting against stone that offers no comfort. I used to hate my tiny apartment back home, the one-bedroom loft with broken blinds and a bed that dipped in the middle like it had opinions. But right now? I would kill to wake up in that creaky-ass bed. To smell burnt coffee. To trip over the cat I never fed on time.

Anything but this.

The bond’s worse now.

Hotter. Sharper. It creeps beneath my skin like wildfire, curling low in my belly, humming at the base of my spine. It shouldn't feel like this. I didn’t write it to feel like this. The bond was supposed to be power and pain, not this... ache.

Not this pull.

It feels like I’m tethered to something I can’t escape, like he’s there even when he isn’t, standing just behind me with that too-silent stare and the voice that sounds like ruin and sin made a pact.

And I—I made him.

I wrote him.

I gave him teeth.

I put death in his hands and called it leadership. I wrote his rage like it was righteous and his violence like it was truth. I gave him a world, then denied him a heart. And now he’s walking through the one I never meant to give him.

Mine.

God, I’m so tired.

My eyelids are heavy. My breath is shallow. I haven’t eaten since yesterday, and even that was just stale bread and bitter water. If this keeps up, my body’s going to give in before my mind does.

Or maybe that’s the point.

Maybe this is the chapter he wanted all along—the one where Quinn Blake breaks herself before he ever gets the truth.

I close my eyes, just for a second.

Just to rest.

And then I remember.

I wrote a way out.

Not a perfect one. Not a real one. But a loophole buried in Chapter Seventeen. The rejection vow. The one I gave to an Omega who was meant to belong to the wrong Alpha, the one who died in the third act.

The words come back like a whisper in my blood.

I clear my throat, or try to. It’s dry and raw, and my voice scratches against the quiet. But I say it anyway, dragging the syllables up through the wreckage of my body.

“I… Quinn Blake…”

The chains hum. It’s faint, but I feel it—the magic in the stone reacting. The bond tightening for a breath, then pulling back like a struck nerve. “...unclaim the bond. I sever the tie.”

My heart stutters. Something shifts in the air. “I reject you, Kieran—”

I try to keep going. The last line sits heavy on my tongue, the final cut that would sever whatever this is. But before I can force the last piece out—before I can say the line that would unmake everything, the door slams open.

Hard.

It crashes into the wall with a sound like thunder cracking through the dungeon. I flinch. The chains jerk violently, and the last bit of energy I had drains out of me in a wave of shock and disbelief.

And then he’s there.

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t slow. He crosses the room in four long strides, and the expression on his face—God. It’s not rage. It’s not fury.

It’s fear.

“Don’t,” he snarls, voice low and fractured as he reaches me. “Don’t say another fucking word.”

My name tears out of his throat like a roar, hands catching me before I hit the floor fully, yanking the chains from the ceiling with one brutal twist of his arm. My body collapses against him, too weak to fight, too far gone to even curse.

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

“No,” he growls, hauling me up against his chest.

I want to speak. I want to say I wasn’t trying to leave—I was trying to survive. I was trying to go home. I thought that maybe if I said the words, if I undid the bond, I’d wake up in my bed with wine on my pillow and my editor blowing up my phone.

“Quinn,” he says again, softer now, pressing his forehead to mine.

I don’t answer.

I can’t.

Everything’s going black around the edges. My body’s shaking, cold in places it shouldn’t be, and all I can think is maybe this is it. Maybe this is the moment I go back.

Back to my world. Back to my keyboard. Back to unfinished drafts and too much wine and not enough sleep. But then I hear his voice, closer now, rough and raw.

“You don’t get to leave,” Kieran says softly, almost broken. “Not yet. Not until I say so.”

I want to fight. I want to curse him. But the world slips sideways.

And everything goes dark.