Housebound with the Blackridge Heirs novel Chapter 121

Chapter 121

Maya

I woke like I had been dragged up from the bottom of a lake, lungs heavy and mind thick, my body trying to remember which parts of itself were supposed to move and which parts were supposed to stay still.

The air tasted different than Elise’s house, cleaner but colder, with a sharp bite that reminded me of stone walls and winter wind and the kind of places people built when they wanted to keep something in, not keep something safe.

My head throbbed in a slow, pulsing rhythm that matched my heartbeat, and when I tried to swallow, my throat scraped like I had been screaming for hours, even though I couldn’t remember screaming at all.

I shifted slightly, instinctively reaching for warmth, for the familiar weight of bodies around me, for the tangled comfort of limbs and breath and the bond’s quiet hum that had become impossible to ignore after the heat.

There was nothing.

There was only cold air against my bare skin, and a hollow space beside me where someone should have been, and a silence in my head that felt wrong in the way sudden quiet always did after noise.

I was fully mated to three alpha wolves, and I couldn’t feel one.

I moved my wrist, and metal bit into me.

The sensation was so immediate and so sharp that my breath hitched before my eyes fully opened, because there was no mistaking it, not in the way it pinched and pressed and held me in place.

I tried to lift my arm again, but it didn’t lift. My hand was restrained above my head, secured to something solid with a cuff that was too tight to be decorative and too deliberate to be an accident.

My other wrist followed, trapped in the same way, and when I tugged instinctively, pain shot up my forearms and sparked hot behind my eyes.

My body went rigid, and the wolf inside me slammed forward like a living thing with claws, furious and panicked and ready to rip through whatever dared to cage it.

The moment she rose, she hit something invisible, something that didn’t feel like a wall so much as a thick sheet of glass reinforced by old magic, and the impact made my stomach lurch as if my insides were the ones that had been struck.

Aelera surged, warm and protective by instinct, then stuttered like someone had wrapped a hand around her throat, and I felt her recoil into the back of me with a frustrated snarl that faded into a muted tremor.

Astrid didn’t comfort me.

Astrid didn’t speak.

She hovered at the edge of my awareness like a pair of eyes watching from a dark hallway, present enough to make my skin prickle, silent enough to make my fear sharpen into something uglier.

I forced my eyes open and took in the room with the kind of focus you only get when your body understands before your mind does that you are in danger.

I was on a narrow bed with a hard mattress, the kind that didn’t belong in any home, and the headboard was iron, black and cold, with carvings etched into it that caught the lantern light in thin, vicious lines.

The cuffs were attached to it with short chains that allowed movement only in the way a leash allowed movement, and when I looked closer, I saw an I looked closer, I saw the faintest runes on the metal, scratched in a careful hand that knew exactly what it was doing. w exactly what it was doing.

The walls were stone, and they were too smooth, too clean, as if someone scrubbed them often. There was one door, heavy and solid, with a latch that looked more like a lock you would use on a cell than on a bedroom.

There were no windows. A lantern burned low on a small table, casting a warin glow that didn’t reach the corners, and in those corners the shadows sat deep and still, like they were hiding something or waiting for something.

My breath came faster in spite of myself, because the silence in my bonds was the worst part of it, worse than the cuffs, worse than the cold, worse than waking naked with my wolf muzzled.

I reached for Caden first without thinking, because habit was a cruel kind of comfort, and because his bond had been the loudest in me for so long that my mind expected him even when it shouldn’t have.

There was nothing. I reached for Tylon, for that sharp fire edge that always felt like a storm at my back, and I found only emptiness. I reached for Leo, for the calm steadiness that had been an anchor in the middle of everything, and I found silence so complete it made my throat tighten.

My chest heaved once, then again, and I forced myself to stop tugging at the cuffs because panic made you stupid and I had been punished enough by stupidity already. I steadied my breathing, staring at the door, listening to the quiet, straining for any sign of movement beyond it.

The worst part about being trapped was never the trap itself, it was the waiting to find out who put you there and why.

A sound came from the shadows, soft and deliberate, like a shift of weight against stone.

“You’re awake,” a voice said, calm and amused, as if waking up handcuffed was an inconvenience and not a nightmare.

My stomach dropped before my eyes even found him, because I knew that voice the way you knew the sound of a predator circling, the way you knew the wrongness of a smile you couldn’t trust.

Rohan stepped into the lantern light like he belonged there.

He looked almost the same as he had in the grove and in my hallucinations and in the moments I kept hoping were imagination, except now he was closer, and the distance that had made him feel like a threat on the edge of the world was

gone.

He was clean, composed, and irritatingly calm, his dark hair falling neatly around his face, his eyes sharp and intent, his mouth curved in a faint smile like he had won something and was enjoying the taste of it.

I tried to sit up and couldn’t because my arms were above me, and the movement made the cuffs bite harder into my wrists. The humiliation of being naked and restrained hit so hard it burned behind my eyes, and my wolf surged again, furious, only to slam into that invisible suppression with a frustrated crash that made me feel nauseous.

“You,” I rasped, my voice rough, my throat angry. “What did you do to me?”

Rohan’s gaze flicked over me without shame or apology, like my nakedness was a detail he had arranged on purpose, and then he crouched near the bed as if he was speaking to a patient instead of a captive.

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