Chapter 86 – Taken

Chapter 86 – Taken
(Eden’s POV)

For a heartbeat, my brain refused to translate what my eyes were seeing.

He shouldn’t have looked the same—people who haunted you were supposed to blur at the edges, fade under the weight of time—but there he was. The same expensive coat. The same clean barbershop line at his temple. The same cologne that used to cling to my sweaters long after he’d gone. Only his eyes were different. Emptier. Hungrier.

“Miss me?” Daniel asked again, like we were picking up a conversation we’d paused, not a life he’d shattered.

My mouth went dry. “Get out.”

He tilted his head, smile widening as if I’d made a joke. “You’re shaking.” He took a slow step forward. “Don’t. You know I don’t like it when you’re afraid.”

Something cracked through the fear—anger, bright and sharp. I reached for the first thing my hand landed on: the glass paperweight on the console table.

He noticed the shift in my stance and laughed softly. “Careful.”

I didn’t wait for careful. I swung. He caught my wrist mid-air with terrifying ease, the paperweight jolting from my grip, bouncing once on the rug and rolling under the couch.

His breath grazed my cheek. “You always do everything the hard way.”

My free hand darted behind me, groping for the panic fob Levi had clipped to the inside of my waistband earlier, the silent alarm he swore would ping them and security in under thirty seconds. My fingers closed around it—and then Daniel squeezed my captured wrist until white heat shot up my arm and my grip faltered. The fob slipped, skittering across the floor and disappearing beneath the couch alongside the paperweight.

“Don’t,” he murmured, almost tender. “I already cut the line.”

The words made the room tilt. He’d anticipated it. He’d anticipated me.

“You don’t get to talk to me,” I said, forcing the sentence through my teeth. “You don’t get to be here.”

Daniel glanced around the apartment with clinical detachment—the couch where I’d tried to sleep, the mug still on the coffee table, the knit blanket draped over the armrest. “You kept the place neat. Good girl.”

I lunged for the door.

He moved faster. An arm banded around my waist, yanking me back against him. The world contracted to the vise of his forearm and the cold press of metal at my ribs.

“Don’t scream,” Daniel said, voice silk over steel. “You know I don’t make empty threats.”

I didn’t scream.

I drove my elbow back as hard as I could, felt the satisfying thunk of contact, his breath hitching. He swore—sharp, vicious—and in that split second, I twisted free, stumbling toward the kitchen.

Keys. Knives. Phone. Anything.

He caught the back of my shirt, fabric choking tight around my throat, and spun me. My hip slammed into the counter, pain sparking white, and my phone slid off the edge, clattering to the tile and fracturing the screen into a spiderweb. I went for it anyway.

His hand closed over mine first.

“Always so dramatic,” he breathed, and then his other hand lifted something white toward my face.

The sharp, chemical sting hit before my mind found the word.

I turned my head, clamping my mouth shut, breath locked in my chest. Spots burst at the edges of my vision. My lungs screamed.

Think. Move.

I drove my knee up. He anticipated the angle, shifted, took it against his thigh with a grunt. His fingers tightened on my jaw, forcing my face toward the cloth. I bit him. Copper flooded my tongue. He hissed and jerked back.

For a second—one bright, perfect second—I was free. I stumbled to the sink, slapped the faucet on, grabbed the heavy spray nozzle with shaking hands and turned, blasting him in the face. He reeled, cursing, and I hurled the nozzle at him, water arcing wild across the floor.

Run.

I shot for the hallway. He caught the neckline of my sweater; it ripped with a sound that felt obscene. His other hand slammed into the wall beside my head, rattling a picture frame, and the chemical reek returned, blooming like a bruise in the air.

“You made me work for this,” Daniel said, almost admiring. “But you were always coming home.”

“This isn’t your home,” I rasped.

His smile thinned. “Then I’ll take you to mine.”

I held my breath until my lungs burned. Tears blurred the hall light into halos. He didn’t rush. He waited, patient as a predator, until my body forced me to drag in air.

The fumes hit like a wave.

My knees buckled. The world dissolved at the edges, colors smearing, sound warping into a tinny echo. I clawed at his wrist. Nails met skin. He didn’t flinch.

Somewhere beneath the roar in my head, I heard a door—my door—open and close. A quiet, efficient movement. A second set of footsteps. The soft, almost cheerful chirp of tape pulling from a roll.

Not alone. He hadn’t come alone.

“Don’t bruise her face,” Daniel said. “She hates photos like that.”

Hands took my wrists, cool and impersonal, binding them. I fought, but it felt like pushing through wet sand. The hallway light swung, or maybe my vision did.

I tried to memorize something—anything. The caretaker’s watch ticking on the second man’s wrist. The faint citrus of a different cologne under the chemical sting. The way Daniel’s breath hitched when my teeth had broken his skin. The steady hum of an engine outside, too close, like a vehicle idling at the curb.

“Look at me,” Daniel said.

I did, because I couldn’t not. The world narrowed to his eyes.

“Good girl.” His voice gentled. “You keep doing exactly what I say, and they’ll live very long, very happy lives. Do you understand me?”

My mouth wouldn’t form words. I nodded, because my body was floating somewhere above the floor and below the ceiling and nodding was all it knew how to do.

“See?” he murmured. “You’ve always known how to listen.”

The cloth pressed close again, a final insistent cloud. The ceiling swam. The edges of the world curled inward.

In the last sliver of clarity, I saw it: the paperweight gleaming dully beneath the couch, the panic fob beside it. And right beside the fob, a small smear of red where I’d bitten him, a tiny crescent of blood on my floor.

Evidence. Proof. A breadcrumb.

I clung to it like a rope.

Daniel’s mouth tilted near my ear, the words sliding in with the dark.

“You’re mine again.”

And then the hallway light blinked out.