It’s the only rule we have.
We don’t fuck the Darlings because fucking Darlings is what got us into this mess.
We don’t fuck the Darlings.
We just break them.
3
WINNIE
When I wake, I have the same sensation I had when I fell asleep in the back of Mom’s old car while she drove us six states west.
I’m not where I’m supposed to be, everything hurts, and nothing feels the same.
I hear the seagulls first.
We haven’t lived near the ocean in seven years, but their squawk stirs the old memories of the sand coating our floors, the sound of the waves and the smell of the dune grass.
I’ve always loved the water. It makes me happy.
I hear an intake of breath after the gulls and the breath isn’t mine.
When I open my eyes, I find a boy peering down at me.
No, not a boy exactly. He has the youth of a boy, but the presence of a man.
Long black hair is tied into a bun at the back of his head. His gaze is knife-like, sharp and glinting as he takes in the sight of me. His skin is the color of the bright side of a blood moon and black tattoos run over his bare chest. All of the lines are precise and symmetrical on both sides of his body. They start at his neck and travel like a labyrinth over the rest of him, disappearing beneath the waistband of ripped, black jeans.
He is a vision of dark virility.
“Good morning, Darling,” he says.
“Where am I?” I lurch upright only to find I’m chained to a wall.
That’s kinky.
“For your safety,” he says, nodding at the chain.
“From what?”
“Wandering off.” He smirks. He has full, puffy lips.
“She awake?” another voice says from the doorway.
I follow the sound and my brain stutters to a stop.
It’s like I’m seeing double.
Except this guy’s dark hair is cut much shorter and fans over his head in waves. The tattoos are exactly the same though, from what I can tell. This one is wearing a shirt.
“Before you ask,” the new one says, “yes, you are hallucinating.”
The other grunts. “Don’t fuck with her, Bash. She’ll get plenty of that later.”
The one named Bash comes over. “How are you, Darling? Sometimes the journey here is hard on a girl.”
My throat is raw and dry, my tongue like sandpaper in my mouth. I’m a little queasy and foggy, but other than that I seem okay.
Other than the fact I was kidnapped by someone I thought was a myth or a delusion and now I’m chained to a bed by the ocean. Back home, the closest ocean is several hundred miles away.
Just how far did they take me?
“I’m fine,” I answer.
“Water?” the one by my bedside asks.
“Yes, please.”
For my entire life, my mother prepared me for this moment, sometimes in the most painful of ways, and none of it was enough.
She literally told me this would happen and yet now that it is, it’s still hard to wrap my head around.
Is it real? Or is this delusion how the madness begins?
The bed beneath me feels real. The warm tropical air, real. The space that the boys take up in the room, the energy that fills it—very, very real.
There is something about these boys that is more potent that any of the boys I’ve hung out with before and I’ve hung out with plenty.
Pretty boys always make the time go by faster. I hate being bored. But most of all, I hate being alone.
Bash disappears into another doorway on the other side of the room and returns with a cup of water. Condensation already blooms across the glass.
The gulls cry again.
I can hear waves crashing over rocks somewhere in the distance.
As I drink the water down—it’s crisp and cool and somehow the most refreshing glass of water I’ve ever had—I take in my surroundings.
We’re in a large room with crumbling plaster walls that look like they were once painted a bright shade of emerald. There are three rectangular windows to my right with slatted wooden shutters pulled open. There are no screens on the windows. Light pours in. Beyond, I can make out the branches of a palm tree and below it, a tree blooming with bright red flowers.
I’m on a bed with a thick wooden frame and what feels like a feather-stuffed mattress. The white sheet is clean, bleached to a crisp. There is no blanket.
A wingback chair sits in the corner with a long-armed lamp behind it and an end table.
That would be a nice place to sit to listen to the gulls if I wasn’t chained to the bed.
I hand the glass back. The boy sets it on the floor. He must be sitting on a stool at my bedside because he’s decidedly sitting but with no chair in sight.