//CW/// Kidnapping, prison, abuse//
Felicity's eyes opened to artificial brightness.
The ceiling panels buzzed overhead, casting a sterile white glow that remained constant, cold, and harsh against her retinas.
She breathed in chemicals and the tang of sanitized steel, an atmosphere stripped of anything organic. For a moment, she didn't move, taking inventory of her condition.
Parched mouth. A hollow throb in her skull not physical damage. Something missing.
She couldn't feel the ocean anymore. With careful effort, she raised herself upright.
The room was a converted storage unit. Concrete walls reinforced with steel bands. A narrow cot bolted to the floor. A drain in the corner. A recessed slot in the wall where food would arrive. No windows. No decorations. No marks to count days. When she swallowed, something inside her recoiled.
Her magic was wrong.
Not gone. Not stolen. It was… muted. Like trying to sing underwater. Her words pressed against her chest and went nowhere, dissolving into a dull pressure that made her temples throb. She whispered anyway. A habit. A comfort.
Nothing happened. The pressure surged in response. Sharp, punishing, immediate. Felicity gasped, clutching the edge of the cot as nausea rolled through her.
A voice crackled from the ceiling.
"Do not attempt ability usage."
Female. Calm. Almost bored. Felicity froze.
"You are not damaged," the voice continued. "Do not damage yourself."
A pause. Long enough to make the silence feel intentional.
"Cleanliness inspection occurs every six hours. Food arrives twice daily. You will remain quiet. You will remain compliant."
The light brightened by a fraction. Felicity's heart hammered. She forced herself to breathe evenly, eyes scanning the room again, slower this time. This wasn't a prison. It was a warehouse.
She learned the rules by watching. A door down the corridor opened once while she was awake. A woman she never saw screamed. Not long. Just enough. The sound cut off abruptly, replaced by silence so complete it rang.
When Felicity's door opened for inspection, she stood exactly where the guards pointed.
Hands at her sides. Eyes down. They checked her skin. Her mouth. Her hair. One guard snapped gloves off with irritation when she flinched too slowly.
"Rule one," he said flatly. "Quiet." Another guard gestured to the floor. "Rule two. Clean."
They left without another word. Felicity scrubbed herself raw in the allotted wash period. She folded the thin blanket exactly how the guards had shown her. She sat when told. Stood when told. She did not speak. She noticed things anyway.
Everyone was alone. Cells spaced far enough apart that voices didn't carry. Movement staggered so no two captives crossed paths. The majority were women. Some human. Some beast. Some too young.
Some far too resigned. No mirrors. No clocks. No names spoken. This place did not want rebellion. It wanted erosion. By the end of the first cycle, Felicity understood the most important rule.
Shut up. So she did.
⸻
Far away, the Snow team traveled home.
The escort mission had gone smoother after the initial ambush. The traders were alive. Spirits were high. Luna rode on Victor's shoulders, chattering excitedly about the "shiny glass fish" she'd seen in Tidehaven.
Frost practiced shield formations with Rose's instructions echoing in his head. Victor opened his space again and again, tucking away small things. Blankets. Warm fabric. Sweet dried fruit Luna insisted Felicity would love. "She'll laugh at this," Luna said, holding up a crooked metal charm. Victor smiled.
They did not know.
————-
Felicity could tell by the way the guards avoided her gaze that something terminal had been decided.
Felicity discovered the unspoken rule: women here were expected to possess meager magic and occupy the lowest levels.
So she nodded and lowered her eyes, letting her true power sink beneath a facade of deference that the men around her found comfortably familiar.
She was up and dressed well before they keyed open her cell the soft linen shift, the small, nervous self consciousness of smoothing it down her thighs. Her ears twitched. She kept them as still as she could. Her tail, traitorously expressive, curled tight against the side of her leg.
"Come." That was all the first guard said.
She nodded. When she stepped over the inscribed threshold, the suppression ward snapped cold and heavy across her skin, forcing her breath short. The walk was methodical, neither rushed nor hesitant: a practiced, careful doom. No other prisoners in this wing. The sounds, when there were any, didn't travel.
The halls grew older, staler. Concrete leafed into stone, and the electric buzz of overhead panels yielded to sullen torchlight, the air redolent of oil smoke and the faintest tang of ash.
She recognized it, the way trauma left its flavor in stone. The holding cells above had been new, clinical, built for the first rounds of mutations. Down here these were meant for something else. Something permanent.
At the end of a corridor scarred with claw marks and soot, the guards stopped. One rapped a coded sequence on the door. It swung inward, soundless.
They didn't shove her. Instead, they withdrew and left her standing in the doorway, the line between before and after perfectly visible.
He was the first thing she noticed, not because of his size, though there was that, or the serpentine poise, but because his presence was so complete it blurred the edges of the room.
The air itself felt bent toward him. He faced the window, profile graven with tension so absolute it vibrated.
His scales obsidian shot through with the faintest gold caught the light in a way that said: Look, but do not touch. His hands, long fingered and claw tipped, rested on the sill as if to hold himself in this reality.
Felicity's breath came shorter. Not from the field, but from the scent. It should have repulsed her: burning, metallic, alive in the way fresh cut grass was alive but edged with something predatory. Instead, she felt her knees nearly give. She steadied herself.
He did not turn when he spoke. "Sit."
She did, because she had been taught well, and because it seemed unlikely he would appreciate the show of will.
The floor was cold and clean. She folded her hands in her lap, eyes averted, trying not to breathe him in.
He turned then, and it was like a new atmosphere swept through the cell. Damien's gaze cut to her yellow, slit pupil, not unkind but shatteringly attentive.
She flinched. He noted it. His jaw flexed.
"I do not want your fear," he said. Each syllable weighed.
Felicity swallowed. "It's not a choice, sir." He considered this. Poured water from a battered jug, set a tin cup before her on the floor. "Drink."
She drank. It was clear, cool, the taste a gift after days of nothing but recycled, metallic tang.
A dizzying relief. When she set the cup down, he was crouched across from her, close enough to touch if she reached a distance that, in beast world etiquette, spoke of both challenge and intimacy.
He smelled her. Not rudely, but as a bloodhound might, searching for truth. His throat worked. Something unreadable flickered in his eyes.
"I'm sorry you were brought," he said, softer now. "It's not how I would have preferred."
She nodded, silence wrapping the words in gauze. For a long time, nothing happened. He seemed content to let the quiet build, as though testing the weight of each second. "You have never bitten," he said abruptly. It was true. Felicity shook her head.
"You could." He said
"I prefer not to," she replied, voice almost gone.
His smile was unexpected. Crooked, a tinge of wryness. "You're the oddest of them all." This, too, was true. He rose, tail flicking, and produced a tray from the low table food, real food, heavy with aromas she'd tried to forget. He fed her. Not with his own hands, but by setting each plate within her reach, overseeing every bite with the wary patience of a wild thing tamed just long enough to endure its own gentleness.
When she finished, sated and dazed, he sat back, arms folded. "You know what comes next."
Felicity nodded. He circled her once, deliberate, as if letting his instincts file every piece of her size, scent, every flicker of vulnerability and threat. She braced herself, expecting cold hands, a roughness. Instead, he placed a single claw gently beneath her chin, tilting her face upward. His scales were not cold, but warm, luminescent. "Look at me," he said. She did.
Damien's expression softened, almost imperceptibly. "I will not hurt you, but you must understand: down here, even kindness is a weapon."
Felicity drew a trembling breath. "I would rather kindness than cruelty."
He smiled, something almost human in the stretch of his lips. "Then I'll be your weapon." He let her chin go, and the next moment he turned away, as if granting her privacy within the bare cell. The gesture was more respectful than anything she'd known in days.
That night, he let her sleep on the bed. He took the couch. In the dark, Felicity pulled the blanket to her chin. She could smell his presence, closer than any heartbeat. And for the first time since her mutation, she slept so deeply she missed the changing of the guard.
Above, the rest of the world would plot and posture. In the quiet belly of the fortress,
Felicity's chosen silence bound her to Damien with a strength neither of them dared name. Tomorrow would come. But tonight, for the first time, she was not prey.