Page 22 of Taken
My fingers find smooth sheets, and I blink at them as if they might dissolve.
The ceiling above me isn’t painted drywall, but a dome etched with drifting corals that twitch when I look at them.
Light comes in blues and golds like moonlight filtered off the ocean through something that isn’t a window—a skylight of sorts, maybe?
And thereheis.
The stranger I thought I hallucinated.
He stands at the edge of the bed, that impossible silhouette made flesh.
Taller, broader than any man I’ve ever seen. His hair is a mass of dark curls, tousled and wet-looking as if he has just risen from the surf.
Two horns curve back from his head—like a ram’s. They remind me of black coral, elegant and entirelynothuman.
Runes crawl along his throat and collarbone, faintly luminous like tide lines.
His eyes catch the light, and they are everything my dream promised and more—storm-colored, fathomless, and somehow older than my understanding of time itself.
“Where am I? What have you done?”
The question tears out of me before I can swallow it into something less frantic.
My voice is small and cracked, a child’s voice asking the world to explain itself.
He doesn’t flinch.
He regards me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.
For a moment, it’s like I’m a starfish in one of those tide pools summer camps take kids to learn about sea life—observed, measured, too exposed—and I hate it.
Panic flares hot and animal, but beneath it there’s a strange, reluctant curiosity.
“Be calm,” he says.
I want to yell, to rage. Who would be calm at a time like this?
But he smells so good as he draws near.
Like salt and old wood and a memory I can’t name.
“You’re awake sooner than I thought you’d be.”
His voice is low, each syllable a wave.
He doesn’t sound cruel. He sounds like an ocean that has learned to speak in human tones.
“Where am I?” I blurt before my brain can catch up to my mouth.
The sound comes out ragged, thin.
Like I’ve been holding my breath for too long.
“You are safe, Phoebe Sewell.”
Safe.
The word is ridiculous in a room that smells like salt and old secrets, spoken by a man who looks like a storm carved into flesh.
