Captured

Captured Lauren Biel Copyright © 2023 by Lauren Biel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Captured/Lauren Biel 1st ed. Cover Design: Pretty in Ink Creations Content Editing: Sugar Free Editing Interior Design: Sugar Free Editing For more information on this book and the author, visit: www.LaurenBiel.com Please visit LaurenBiel.com for a full list of content warnings. This is my darkest story, and it is dedicated to the readers who are brave enough to read it and enjoy it! Contents Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Epilogue Connect with Lauren Acknowledgments Also by Lauren Biel About the Author Prologue Alexzander I clutched the box containing a game of checkers to my ten-year-old chest and crept toward my mother’s room. It was the game my mother and I played every night, though it was often hard to think about my next move with all the noise coming from the room further down the hall. When the screaming quieted on those nights and The Man yelled for me, my mother would try to shield me with her broken wings. “Can he finish our game first?” she would ask. Sometimes it worked, but usually he wanted me to come and take my turn with the women after he and my brother had broken them. When the women had no fight left. My brother was fifteen, and he and my father could handle a fresh one. I was too young. “Lou,” The Man would say to my mother, “you’re gonna make that kid more fucked up. He ain’t gonna know how to fuck a woman right if we don’t teach him.” She didn’t argue with him when he said no. She couldn’t, even though she wanted to. If she pushed too hard with her voice, he’d push back with his fists. And whatever else lay nearby. My mother loved me in a way she didn’t love anyone else, not even my brother. She hated what he became. He’d followed on The Man’s coattails, getting his dick wet any chance he could. The Man wanted my brother to grow up just like him, and he was doing exactly that. There were no screams that night, though. It was a Chapter One 20 Years Later Alexzander I exited the diner with my leftovers tucked under my arm and got in the truck. I watched the girl with long, dark hair as she bussed the table where I’d sat. My fingers went for the receipt tucked inside the takeout bag. I liked the way she always signed the slip of paper with a heart dotting the i in her name. Ophelia. She’d slipped extra ranch into the takeout bag for me too, just like she always did. She knew my order by now: scrambled eggs and ranch. Like everything else in my life, my tastes were fucked up. I drove home with my belly full and my mind lingering on the normalcy of that damn diner. Today there’d been a man sitting with his family. A wife who wasn’t chained up sat beside him. She seemed happy to be around him. Behind them sat a trucker who found happiness in the bottom of a pie plate. Normal people doing normal things. Then again, I might have looked pretty normal to them, too. I shook my head and pulled onto the driveway leading to a run-down farmhouse in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere—the place I called home. The grass grew tall and free. Wildflowers dotted the greenery with splashes of color. A wooden barn stood tall behind the house, but it was one kick away from falling over. The wood had been cut and hammered into place long before I was born, and it hadn’t received any maintenance over the years. And within that barn was a trapdoor that