Chapter 1: Awakening in Chains
The first thing she knew was the taste of blood. Copper and salt, thick on her tongue. The second was the ache, a deep, radiating throb that pulsed from her skull down her spine in nauseating waves. Sage forced her eyes open, a stabbing protest from the fluorescent light above.
A single bulb, caged in wire, buzzed like an angry insect. Its sickly glow showed her the rest: a cavern of dank concrete and rust. Rust on the pipes snaking across the low ceiling, rust on the metal shelves piled with dusty cans, rust in the air she breathed—damp and metallic. Her arms were wrenched behind her, bound to something solid and cold. A support beam. The coarse rope bit into her wrists with every shallow breath.
Where.
Where am I.
Who.
The questions were silent screams in her head, met with a blank, terrifying wall. Her memory was just… gone. A void, filled only with the pounding now and the sharp, animal scent of her own fear.
A shadow moved at the edge of the light.
Her breath hitched. She hadn’t seen him, standing so still he was just another part of the gloom. He stepped forward, his boots scuffing grit on the floor. The light caught him in pieces. Worn jeans. A black t-shirt stretched over a broad, solid frame. Scars crossed his knuckles, pale seams against tanned skin. His face was all hard lines and angles, a map of violence, his eyes dark and assessing.
He stopped a few feet away, just watching. His silence was worse than shouting.
“Who are you?” The words scraped out of her throat, raw. “Why am I tied up?”
He didn’t answer right away. He pulled a folding knife from his pocket, the click of it opening loud in the quiet. He rolled the handle in his palm, a slow, deliberate motion.
“Found you in a ditch,” he said. His voice was gravel, low and worn. “Off the old highway. Half-drowned in mud and rain. You were bleeding from a head wound. Unconscious.”
She stared at him, trying to fit that image into the nothingness. A ditch. Rain. It meant nothing.
“So you brought me here and tied me up.” It wasn’t a question.
“You were saying things. Before you passed out.” He tilted his head slightly. “Things that didn’t make sense. Not for a normal person lying in a ditch.”
A cold trickle, unrelated to the damp, traced down her spine. “What things?”
He took another step. He was close enough now that she could see the faint stubble shadowing his jaw, the permanent furrow between his brows. “You said, ‘the binding is fracturing.’ You said, ‘they’re coming.’ Then you reached out, hand covered in mud, and the rain… stopped. Just over you. For about three seconds.” He paused, letting that settle. “Then you collapsed.”
Sage’s heart hammered against her ribs. It sounded like madness. Like a dream. She had no memory of it. But a deep, instinctual part of her clenched tight, a secret muscle she hadn’t known was there.
“I was delirious,” she whispered.
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. He gestured with the knife toward her, not in threat, but indication. “The blood on your shirt isn’t all from the head wound. You’ve got other marks. Older. On your back. Looks like symbol work. Ritualistic.”
How could he know that? Her mind raced, a trapped bird. The void in her memory yawned wider, more frightening. Who was she? What had been done to her?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice gained a desperate edge. “I don’t remember anything. My name… I think my name is Sage.”
“First name or last?”
“I don’t know.”
He studied her face, his gaze unflinching. It felt less like being seen and more like being appraised, weighed for threat level. “People who are hunted make noise,” he said finally. “They attract attention. The kind I don’t need. So here are the options. You’re a victim. In which case, the people who did this to you might come looking. Or you’re the threat. In which case, you’re already where you can do the least damage.”
“I’m not a threat.” The plea sounded weak, even to her.
“Your pupils are still uneven. Concussion’s a bitch. You’re also lying about not remembering everything.” He said it flatly. “Your eyes flick down and to the left when you’re searching the blank. Just now, when I said ‘symbol work,’ they went straight to the corner. Accessing. Not inventing.”
She froze. He was watching that closely.
A flare of anger cut through the fear, hot and sudden. “You’re going to keep me tied to a beam based on where I look?”
“I’ve kept people restrained on less.” He folded the knife, shoved it back in his pocket. The action was dismissive. The decision was made. “You’ll stay until I figure out what you are. Or until whatever you’re running from shows up. Then I’ll decide.”
He turned to walk away, back toward a set of wooden stairs leading up into darkness.
Panic surged, white and blinding. It wasn’t just the thought of being left here. It was the yawning nothing inside her, the terrifying sense of a chasm waiting to swallow her whole. This man, this brutal, scarred stranger, was the only tether she had to any reality.
“Don’t!”
The word ripped out of her, louder than she intended. It echoed off the concrete. He paused, one foot on the bottom stair, but didn’t turn.
The anger and fear swirled, a storm in her chest. She pulled against the ropes, the pain in her wrists a sharp, clarifying fire. A pressure began to build behind her eyes, in her temples. A humming in her blood. The buzzing light above flickered, once, twice, then started to pulse in time with her frantic heartbeat.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
The man—Frank, she suddenly knew his name was Frank, though she couldn’t say how—slowly turned around.
His expression hadn’t changed, but his posture had. Coiled. Ready. He was looking at the light, then back at her.
The humming grew. The damp in the air began to bead on the rusted pipes, trembling, then rising in minute droplets, a shimmering mist that caught the erratic light. The pool of her blood on the concrete near his boot shivered.
Sage stared at it, her breath coming in short gasps. She wasn’t doing this. She couldn’t be. But the pressure was coming from her, from that clenched, secret place inside.
Frank Castle didn’t flinch. He watched the blood quiver, watched the spectral mist. His hand rested near his pocket, near the knife.
“Or until,” he repeated, his voice cutting through the hum, “you prove exactly what you are.”
Above them, with a sharp pop, the light bulb blew. Shards of glass rained down, glittering in the sudden moonlight that sliced through the cracked high window. In the sudden silver-and-shadow world, they stared at each other: the witch with no past, and the man who had seen too much to be surprised by monsters.
The air still vibrated. The droplets hung, frozen.
Frank took his hand from his pocket. Empty. He nodded, once, as if she’d just confirmed a deep, unspoken suspicion.
“We’ll start there,” he said.
“We’ll start there,” he said.
He didn’t move to clean up the glass. He didn’t relight the room. The moonlight was enough for him. He stepped over the glittering shards, his movement a study in controlled tension, and stopped just outside her reach. The space between them crackled with the aftermath of whatever had just happened.
“What’s your full name?”
Sage swallowed, her throat dry. “I told you. I don’t know.”
“Try.”
“Sage. That’s all.”
“Who were you running from?”
“I don’t know.” The pressure behind her eyes was building again, a dull, insistent throb.
“The marks on your back. Who carved them?”
“I can’t see my own back!” Her voice rose, edged with a shrillness that betrayed her fraying control. She yanked at the ropes, the beam groaning behind her. “I don’t remember anything before the ditch. Just… shapes. Feelings. Cold. The sound of chanting. That’s not a memory, it’s a nightmare!”
Frank leaned in, his face closer now. She could see the fine lines around his eyes, the pale scar cutting through his eyebrow. His breath smelled of coffee and gun oil. “What’s the binding?”
The word landed like a physical blow. It resonated in that hollow, secret place inside her, a key scraping a locked door. Her vision swam. “I don’t—”
“You said it. ‘The binding is fracturing.’ What does that mean?”
“Stop it.” A whisper.
“Who are ‘they’? Who’s coming?”
The questions were hammer strikes, each one trying to force open a door that led only to a void. The emptiness itself began to pulse, a sick, expanding pain. She shook her head, her dark hair sticking to her damp cheeks.
“Tell me one true thing,” Frank demanded, his voice low and relentless. “One concrete fact. Where were you born?”
Panic, pure and acidic, flooded her mouth. She strained against the ropes, the fibers burning deeper into her wrists. A sob ripped its way out of her chest, harsh and ugly in the concrete space.
“I can’t! There’s nothing there! It’s just dark!” Tears welled, hot and blurring, spilling over and cutting tracks through the dirt and dried blood on her face. They were not delicate; they were heaving, wrenching things that shook her entire bound body.
He didn’t relent. He watched her cry the way a mechanic watches a failing engine. “Your power. Where did you learn to use it? Who taught you?”
The sob hitched, caught in her constricted throat. She tried to draw a breath and choked on it—a wet, ragged sound. The choking fit seized her, bending her forward against her restraints. Each cough was a dagger in her ribs. A coppery tang, fresh and warm, flooded her tongue.
She coughed again, a spray of crimson spattering the concrete between his boots.
The violence of it silenced him. The aggressive press of his questions snapped off.
Sage sagged, the fight draining out of her as quickly as it had come. The world telescoped, the edges of her vision softening into a gray haze. The moonlight on the floor seemed to dim. The ache in her skull was no longer a throb but a vast, consuming roar. She felt incredibly heavy, as if her bones were filling with lead.
Her chin dropped to her chest. She couldn’t hold it up. The ropes were the only thing keeping her upright. Each breath was a shallow, whistling effort. The metallic scent of her own blood filled her nostrils.
Frank stood perfectly still, looking from her face, now pale and slack, to the fresh blood on the floor, mingling with the old.
He hadn’t seen that. Internal injury. The possibility changed the calculus entirely.
Her eyes, those striking blue eyes, started to lose their focus. The fierce, calculating light he’d glimpsed was guttering out, replaced by the glassy sheen of shock. She wasn’t lying. She was breaking. And she was doing it right in front of him.
Her last whisper was almost inaudible, just a breath shaped into words. “See? I’m… no one.”
Then her eyelids fluttered shut. Her body went utterly limp in the bonds, held only by the cruel ropes. The only movement was the faint, terrifyingly slow rise and fall of her shoulders.
The only movement was the faint, terrifyingly slow rise and fall of her shoulders.
Frank stood there for a full minute, just watching. Listening. The drip of condensation from a pipe matched the sluggish rhythm of her breath. His own mind was a silent, cold ledger. Weighing.
A dead woman in his safehouse was a problem. A complicated, evidence-shaped problem. It would mean moving, burning a location, wasting time. A living woman, especially one who could make lights blow out and blood tremble, was a different kind of problem. Possibly a worse one.
He ran through the facts, stripping them of any emotion. Fact: She was hurt worse than he’d thought. Internal bleeding. Fact: She had no memory, or was a phenomenal liar. Fact: She had power. Something had happened with the light, the water, the blood. It wasn’t a trick. The glass was still on the floor.
Another fact: She had said they were coming.
If she died here, whatever was chasing her wouldn’t stop. It would just lose her scent at his doorstep. And he’d have no information, no leverage, nothing but a corpse and a wave of unknown trouble rolling in blind.
If she lived… she was intelligence. A source. Maybe a weapon. Definitely a liability.
Her breath hitched, wet and wrong.
Frank’s jaw tightened. A muscle flickered in his cheek. He’d spent a lifetime making choices in split seconds, decisions that carved paths through flesh and consequence. This one felt different. It was slower. Heavier.
He looked at her, slumped and broken against the beam. Not a victim, not a threat. Just a piece of something bigger that had crashed into his world. A loose end that was currently bleeding out.
He muttered a single, harsh word to the empty room. A curse.
Then he moved.
FRANK MAKES A CHOICE.
The knife was back in his hand before he’d even consciously decided to reach for it. Two long strides brought him behind her. He didn’t gentle his touch. He grabbed a fistful of her dark, tangled hair and pulled her head upright to slacken the rope. The blade sawed through the thick fibers, the sound a rough whisper against the buzz in his ears.
The ropes fell away.
She collapsed forward, a dead weight. He caught her under the arms before her face hit the concrete, the heat of her body startling against his hands. He hauled her up, her head lolling against his shoulder. She was lighter than he expected.
He carried her to the cleared workbench against the wall, sweeping tools and old rags onto the floor with a clatter. He laid her on her side, the position careful, clinical. He ripped open a sealed pack of sterile gauze from a ammo crate turned medical kit and pressed it hard against the weeping wound on her scalp. His other hand went to the side of her throat, fingers finding a pulse. It was there—threadbare and rapid, a bird trapped in a cage of ribs.
“You don’t get to die,” he grunted, not looking at her face. He was talking to the injury, to the circumstance. “Not until you tell me what you are and who’s after you. We clear?”
She gave no answer. Her skin was clammy.
He worked quickly, efficiently. Pressure on the head wound. Checked her pupils again with a small penlight. They were still uneven, slow to contract. Bad sign. He pulled a shears from the kit and cut through the back of her bloodied shirt, peeling the fabric aside.
The marks he’d mentioned were there. Just above her kidneys, carved into the skin. Not fresh scars, but old ones, whitish-silver against the dusky gold of her skin. They weren't random cuts. They were symbols. Interlocking, angular, deliberate. A language of violence.
He stared at them. No tattoo ink. This was scar tissue. Someone had taken a blade and etched this into her. A long time ago.
His eyes narrowed. The pieces shifted, locking into a new, darker configuration. This wasn’t just someone on the run. This was property. Branded.
The faint, involuntary magic she’d sparked made sense now. It wasn’t trained. It was leaking. A caged thing, rattling its bars as the cage itself cracked.
He covered her with a gray wool blanket from a shelf. He taped the gauze in place. There was nothing more he could do here. She needed a scan, fluids, things he couldn’t provide.
Another choice. But he’d already made the big one. The rest was just logistics.
He pulled a burner phone from his pocket, scrolled to a single initial in the contacts. He put the phone to his ear, his gaze never leaving the unconscious woman on the table. The line rang once, twice.
A sleepy, annoyed voice answered. “Do you know what time it is, Castle?”
“I need a favor,” Frank said, his voice low. “The quiet kind. No questions.”
A pause on the line. A sigh. “What kind of favor?”
“I have a package. Damaged. Needs a look, no paper trail.”
“Human package?”
Frank didn’t answer.
The voice on the other end understood the silence. “Christ. Where?”
“I’m moving now. Be at the spot in forty minutes. Come alone. Bring your kit.”
He ended the call without waiting for a reply. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and looked down at Sage. In the stark light, under the blanket, she just looked young. And terribly, completely lost.
“Alright,” he said to the room, to her, to the inevitable trouble now barreling toward him. “Let’s go.”