The Billionaire's Captive Golden Blood Bride

Karley woke on the floor.

The house was silent. The lights had been dimmed to evening settings, though her watch-when she found it, when she managed to focus her eyes-showed it was only mid-afternoon.

She pushed herself up slowly. Her head throbbed. Her cheek felt swollen, tender to the touch. Her hand came away from her face sticky with blood that had dried hours ago.

Brenda was gone. The staff were gone. The spilled soup had been cleaned, the broken phone removed, every trace of violence erased as efficiently as a computer deleting corrupted files.

Karley made it to the stairs. Climbed them one at a time, gripping the railing, her legs shaking with each step. The master bedroom seemed miles away. The bathroom, when she reached it, offered only her own reflection-bruised, hollow, a stranger in her skin.

She needed help. She knew this with the clarity of survival instinct. She needed to leave, to find a hospital, to tell someone what was happening before she disappeared entirely into this house and this marriage and this life that was consuming her.

The bedside phone was an antique, rotary dial, Kevon's affectation for "authenticity." She lifted the receiver with trembling hands and began to dial her father's number.

Frank Brown. Queens. The man who had worked double shifts at the auto plant to put her through art school, who had cried when she told him about the engagement, who had looked at Kevon with suspicion that she had dismissed as working-class prejudice.

Her finger hovered over the final digit.

She couldn't.

She imagined his voice, rough with worry, demanding explanations she couldn't give. Imagined him driving out here, confronting the Mcconnells, being destroyed by lawyers and private security and the sheer weight of wealth that crushed everything it touched.

She hung up.

Her hand moved to the second number before her brain could intervene. Kevon's private line. The one he answered even when he was in meetings, in site visits, in the middle of important conversations.

He would come. He had to come. However cruel he'd been, however distant, he was still her husband. Still the man who had found her on the cliff and called her his soulmate.

The phone rang. Once. Twice.

A voice answered. Female. Young. Familiar.

"Hello?" A pause. "Oh. Karley. I wondered if you'd call."

Devora. Sounding not at all like a woman who had nearly died twelve hours ago. Sounding rested, amused, perfectly healthy.

"Where's Kevon?" Karley's voice cracked.

"He's right here." A rustling, as of fabric against fabric. "He's been taking such good care of me. We didn't sleep at all last night, you know. He was too worried. Too attentive." A giggle, girlish and grotesque. "He's exhausted now. Sleeping like a baby. Should I wake him?"

"No." The word came out strangled. "No, don't-"

"Are you feeling better?" Devora's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "I wanted to thank you, personally. For the blood. It's flowing through my veins right now. Warm. Alive. Your life, keeping me alive." She sighed, contented. "But you know what I realized, Karley? Blood isn't everything. You can give and give and give, and it still won't make him love you. It won't make him choose you. It won't make you anything more than what you are."

"Which is what?"

"A convenience. A resource. A temporary solution until something better comes along." Devora's voice hardened. "You really think you're the first, Karley? Kevon has always had a special appreciation for... 'healthy' women. You should really take a closer look at all those papers you signed. You might find your 'wifely duties' are spelled out in more detail than you remember. You promised him your devotion, after all. He just has a very specific definition of what that entails."

"You're lying." But Karley didn't believe her own words.

"Am I? Ask him why he insisted on such a thorough medical background check before he even proposed. He told me to tell you," Devora continued, "to stay home and rest. Don't make any more scenes. Don't embarrass the family." Her voice dropped to a mocking imitation of Kevon's tones. "Be a good girl, Karley. Be useful. Be quiet. Be grateful we let you in at all."

The line went dead.

Karley stood in the bedroom of her smart house, surrounded by technology that monitored her breathing and her temperature and her location, and understood that she was alone in a way she had never been alone before.

She needed water. She needed to think. She stumbled toward the bathroom, each step requiring conscious effort, her fever-ravaged body betraying her at every turn.

The hallway stretched forever. The walls seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with her own ragged breaths. She reached the center of the corridor and stopped, suddenly uncertain which direction was which, which door led to safety and which to deeper imprisonment.

The floor tilted.

Karley reached for the wall, found nothing but air. She was falling, she realized, with the strange detachment of a dreamer. Falling through space that had no bottom, no end, no mercy.

She hit the carpeted floor without feeling it. Her head bounced once, twice. The ceiling light above her was very bright, very white, very far away.

"Unusual activity detected," the house announced. "Adjusting illumination."

The light dimmed. The world narrowed to a single point, then expanded to darkness.

Karley Mcconnell, twenty-six years old, newly married, rare-blooded and broken-hearted, lay unconscious on the floor of her gilded cage and dreamed of escape.