by Bethany-Kris
She could almost imagine the small hands of the girl stroking her arms and back every time she tried to comfort her.
Overlapping that voice was someone else’s. An older voice—still female—that she couldn’t place, and didn’t feel like she knew quite as well. She was snappy. Angry. Get a hold of yourself, Karine. A commanding voice.
One she should listen to.
Except Karine couldn’t do anything.
The voices filled her head, their words too sharp in her ears, and she couldn’t think straight while they battled for attention. Even covering her ears and asking for them to stop didn’t help.
Why was this happening?
On the floor, fists shaking against her head, rocking side to side to soothe how overwhelmed she was, Karine found at least there, it didn’t feel like she was falling. Nothing else helped. The voices just kept getting louder, bouncing off the walls and filling the room.
Who are you ... who are you ... who are you?
Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?
Worse, was that they spoke like she did know them—or that she should. They apparently knew her.
She no longer recognized the elements of the bedroom. Where did all the furniture go? Even the walls disappeared when she tried to look up.
Sometimes, in intervals, searing pain ravaged her feet. Once, when she looked down, the bloody mess smeared across her ankles and legs finally brought the floor into focus. She couldn’t quite comprehend the pain, or why she was feeling it, though. The reason for the blood barely even registered.
None of it settled in her brain long enough to understand—as fast as the thought landed, it would soar away. Her ears, filled with those voices, rang again until she was begging for it to stop.
“No. No. Please ... stop.”
She kept muttering to herself, repeating a mantra that felt safe and loud even if it didn’t help the problem. It was the only thing she could think to do because even the idea of unraveling from the ball she’d tightened herself into on the floor where she sat was too draining. She wished they’d stop—those voices—that they’d go away, but they didn’t.
Or wouldn’t.
She was helpless and trapped in a body and mind that was battling to be occupied by two other voices. They sounded nothing like her.
They weren’t her.
And she didn’t want them out.
“Karine, hey, look at me.” The male voice broke sharply through her thoughts like metal falling through glass. Shattered fragments fell away. It was his hands curving under her tucked chin, tilting her face out of where she’d buried it in the darkness that sucked away everything and brought his face into clear focus. All at once. Roman stared back at Karine through the wetness of her tears, and asked softly, “Can you hear me?”
Yes.
Yes, she could.
The relief was instant, the silence in her mind bewildering, and Karine couldn’t help but launch herself away from the pit she’d fallen in and into the promise of safety Roman offered to her. Springing up from the floor and into his arms, open for her, her cheek hit his chest when she landed against him. His strong arms wrapped tightly around her body, and she heard the whoosh of air leave his lungs the second he held her.
“I know you heard me say to get the first aid kit—what are you standing there for?” asked Roman gruffly.
Karine looked around the room to find it had come back with walls and all. Masha stood only a foot away, deathly pale with worry writing heavy lines in her forehead. Had she been there all along?
“Yes, sorry, I know,” Masha whispered, wringing her hands together, “but I just wanted to calm her down a bit first, but she wouldn’t listen. She refused—it was like she couldn’t even hear me.”
The tearful strain in Masha’s hoarse voice drew Karine’s gaze to hers where she found the woman’s silent pleading staring back. Please be okay, she seemed to say.
Softly, Masha told Roman, “I’ll be right back with the kit.”
He didn’t reply, and Masha was quick to flee the room, closing the door behind her as she left. Karine pulled away from Roman’s arms, and he released her without argument. But only because it allowed him to bend down and survey the damage done to her feet. Cuts that she couldn’t explain marred the soles of her feet that were now throbbing with the same searing pain from earlier.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered, sucking air through his teeth before adding, “This looks bad.”
It wasn’t the cuts that bothered her the most, but the blood. She’d forgotten about that. Soaked into the large carpet where the bed sat and smeared across the floor, the stains had been violently dragged around where she’d seemingly walked in circles. Not that she could remember walking anywhere let alone in the same place.
The sight of all the blood made her nauseous, and without warning, Karine started to sway on the spot. Before she could meet the floor in a useless heap, Roman curled his arms around her and had her cradled in his hold like a child. The blood was gone from her view as he carried her over to a bed.
His bed, the younger voice whispered. See?
The image of Roman sleeping in that very bed flashed into her mind while hands that looked like hers sketched the image of him doing so at the same time. Karine shook her head wildly to rid the voice and the memory that didn’t feel like hers.
He must have gently put her down on the edge because she didn’t notice she was even on the bed until after she already was. Another blackout—the hardest part was the fact Karine had started to become aware of those minute-moments she couldn’t explain or stitch together in her own mind.
The next thing she knew, Karine stared down and watched Roman crouch between her legs. In his hand, he held her left foot while he examined her sole. She tried to be still, even the crinkle of her toes sent pain shooting through her feet.
If only she cared about the pain, then.
Karine was more concerned with the man touching her. She bit down hard on her lip at the sensation of his fingertips pressing along the side of her heel and then the arch of her foot, too. How could a man like him—who talked as harshly and cold as he sometimes did, who could silence her with nothing more than a look—also caress her so tenderly?
Carefully.
A thrill ran down her spine, the memory of his hands and those fingertips exploring her body filling her mind without warning. Heat spilled hot in her belly until she noticed the blood staining his hand. Roman muttered under his breath to himself, too low for her to hear.
“H-how did that happen?” she managed to ask.
Her voice was barely a whisper, her throat aching like she’d been screaming for hours.
Roman looked up with blue eyes as dark and as dangerous as a raging storm. There was something else reflecting back at her, too, something she couldn’t decipher.
He just seemed ... tired.
“What?” she asked, words shaky.
His silence didn’t help Karine to settle her nerves.
“Why aren’t you talking? Why won’t you tell me what happened—I don’t ... I don’t remember, I’m sorry.”
His cheek worked like he was chewing on his words, and just when she thought he was about to stand and walk away from her, Roman pulled in a deep breath. Then, he said, “You were asleep in the living room by the windows on a chaise. I was in my office, talking to my father. His bull—the bodyguard, Andrey—came in for a drink of water, and when you woke up and saw him, you attacked him with a knife in the kitchen. He dropped the glass of water, and you stepped on the shards.”
His words were accompanied by white noise in the background of her mind—he said things like you attacked and you stepped but she couldn’t find those memories. She almost couldn’t hear him at all.
It only made Karine angry, and that served to turn her irrational. She rocked while she sat on the bed, picking at the tips of her own fingers to keep herself from jumping up off the bed altogether. “N-no, that didn’t happen. You’re wrong,” s
he argued weakly.
“Karine, that is exactly what happened. I have no reason to make up stories. I’m not lying to you.”
But then her mind flashed with the image of Roman in the kitchen, hands on her arms as he said her name—Karine—before it was black again. She didn’t know. It was like the memory jerked her back and forth, everything going still, and the colors fading to black and white for a split second before she was staring at Roman still holding on to her foot with the most careful hands.
She didn’t know what to believe.
Or why this was happening.
“Don’t you think I would remember something like that?” she snapped.
Roman released her foot, then, letting it hang and not quite reach the floor. The look she saw on his face was one she knew all too well. She’d become well acquainted with it whenever someone had just had enough of her.
Whatever that was supposed to mean—she’d never quite understood it when someone said it.
It was the same look her father gave her—or Dima, even, sometimes Masha, too. Anyone who stumbled upon Karine during a particularly bad spell where she was losing more time than she was keeping, and the blank space in her mind was more of a comfort than reality. A look that said she didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about—and neither did they.
It made her feel crazy.
She hated that look.
Maybe it would’ve been easier to handle coming if she was still taking the pills she’d become best friends with over the years. They had a way of numbing her to other people’s reactions and opinions. It didn’t hurt to know someone else thought she was a little odd or even ... off. They softened the edges of her brain so all that chaotic, erratic energy was contained even if it did leave her feeling like a shell of who she should be.
Without them now, she could feel the force of Roman’s stare like a slap across her face. That oh, Karine he was thinking in his mind.
Poor, pity little Karine ... crazy, crazy, crazy.
She turned her eyes away from him, and saw the flashes of images. Black and white again, snaps of memories like a strobe light inside her brain. A man’s back turned to her, a glass of water at his lips. Then, he was staring over his shoulder at her directly. Surprised, but scared, too. Why would he be afraid of her? He was a hulk of a man—big, and unknown, and there. He shouldn’t have been there. The next blink came with the glint of metal—there was a knife in her hand.
“Are you remembering it?” she heard Roman ask.
All those nerves snapping inside of her finally lifted her off the bed, sending Karine running away from the words she didn’t want to hear Roman say. She paced on the spot, determined to get those memories and what he asked out of her head.
That wasn’t her.
It wasn’t.
Roman didn’t make a move toward her, but he followed the path she paced with his guarded gaze. It was like he knew exactly what she was thinking just by staring at her, and Karine couldn’t quite stand that feeling.
A bug under a microscope.
Even if it was his.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped.
Roman sighed, scrubbing a hand over his unshaven jaw. His shoulders squared a bit, then. “Okay, I’m going to go to my bathroom and find what I can for your feet, all right? Masha is taking too long with the first aid kit.”
He turned to go, and the fear gripped Karine instantly at the idea he was going to leave her alone in the room. Would the voices come back—the darkness? She lunged at him, gripping his elbow tightly, and with a little gasp for air, she breathed, “Please don’t leave me here.”
Roman stopped in his tracks, turning back to her with an assurance at the ready—not that it helped. “I’m just going in there, Karine—the bathroom is right there,” he said, pointing at the opened French doors that led to a dimly lit bathroom attached to the bedroom. “You’ll be able to see me from here. Do you understand? We need to do something about those cuts before they start bleeding even worse than they already are.”
It took seconds for her to unfurl her fingers from his arm. Too many seconds, really.
She gulped down the lump in her throat but eventually nodded.
“Promise?” she asked.
Roman stilled when he started to turn away again. “What?”
“I’ll still see you—promise?”
That was the only way she was letting him go anywhere. It felt better like that—everything was better, then.
Roman nodded once, his gaze softening for a brief moment. “Yeah, I promise.”
• • •
Karine hadn’t been given the chance to see her reflection in a mirror, but she was sure she looked like a complete fucking mess. Maybe under different circumstances, she would have cared, but the state of her appearance was the last thing on her mind as Roman worked carefully on her feet to clean and bandage the wounds.
For starters, those voices were still in her head. Even if Karine pretended they weren’t.
They weren’t as loud anymore now that he was there, tending to the wounds on her feet and giving her something better to focus on, but she was acutely aware of their battling presence in the recesses of her mind, trying to override the fading echoes of her very present and aware thoughts.
What were they saying?
The man in the other room—drinking water. He deserved to be knifed, one said, being there like that, she spit right after. The younger one insisted everything would be fine, it always is with Roman.
Karine chewed on the edge of her pinky nail, gaze locked on a freckle on the back of Roman’s hand while he worked on her feet, willing the words away. Pretending like they weren’t there, as she tried to make sense of them at the same time.
Why is this happening?
Her voice—the only one she thought mattered—went unheard, and unanswered.
Of course.
Masha had looked in with the first aid kit in hand, but Roman sent her away. He could handle it. Apparently, the wounds weren’t as bad as they seemed.
On his knees at her feet, working away with his gentle touch, Roman said nothing. No, he simply took care of her. She was still a little too enthralled with that fact—how careful he was, that he took care of her at all, really.
The silence stretched on between them while he finished wrapping the bandages around her heels where she’d gotten the worst of the cuts. But it was only silent to him. Inside, she was screaming.
“It wasn’t me,” Karine whispered suddenly, the words bursting from her softly, but oh, so loud all the same. Roman’s head jerked up, those eyes nailing into hers when she said, “It wasn’t me. With the knife. That man—I-I didn’t attack him.”
Roman put her foot down and straightened up, replying, “Except it was you ... it just wasn’t you, too. I know, Karine.”
He didn’t give her time to argue, or deny anything.
“Their names are Katee and Katina,” he murmured, rubbing his hands together like he was trying to work kinks out of the muscles and didn’t have an issue at all with the things he was saying. It was something that just was. That’s how he offered the information to Karine, he just said it, and she couldn’t tell if he felt any certain way about it. “Katee is a little girl—she draws, hides and watches people, I think.”
That didn’t mean Karine wanted to admit it.
Or believe it.
“You’re lying,” she said, shaking her head fast. Pointing a finger at him, Karine muttered, “Stop it, I don’t want to hear this. You’re lying to me.”
Roman leaned closer to Karine, his brow lifting as he said, “No, you listen to me.”
She stiffened at his tone.
He took that as permission to continue. “They’re there—you’re going to have to accept that because you don’t seem to have very much control of them at the moment. Maybe you manifested them for a purpose, but now they protect you when you can’t deal, you know? I’m not sayin—”
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nbsp; She cut him off with her hand slicing wildly between them in the air. It was like there were hands pinning her to the bed with every word he said, and she just needed him to stop. She fought against the urge to run and let those words sink in, but failed when she ended up running for the bedroom door after flying off the bed.
Roman was faster than her, though. He stood in her way, blocking the door with his impressive size and hard stare.
“Let me go.”
She raged against him.
Pushing.
Crying.
Begging, too.
He didn’t even touch her—didn’t move, either. Not once did he stop her from hitting him, those emotions of hers tumbling out in the worst way.
“I can’t let you leave, Karine,” he told her softly, “You could be a danger to yourself. To others. We gotta get this figured out first, huh? Come on, sweetheart.”
She heard him.
Karine simply didn’t want to.
“You don’t know me,” she sobbed, her strength and desire to run depleting fast. “You know nothing. You have to let me go. I don’t care what happens to me.”
“Karine, I care about what happens to you.”
It all stopped, then.
Her crying.
The fighting.
Even the way he positioned himself in the doorway to block her loosened a bit as those words fell between them. She parted her lips, testing the words she wanted to shout back to protect herself from the hope that dared to grow in her heart. They stuck in her throat instead. He refused to look away.
Roman wanted her to see he meant it—every single word.
Then, he reached for her and she let him. His arms wrapped around her, and despite the feelings trapped inside her that she fought to ignore, she sagged in his embrace because it was fucking easy. He wouldn’t let her fall, but he also wouldn’t let her pretend, either.
“It’s okay,” she heard him say. “We’ll get it figured out, Karine. We will.”
She wished she could walk away now. She didn’t want to hear any explanation he had for the voices in her head, or who they were. Maybe her life was better caged behind the walls of a mansion that didn’t quite feel like home with a constant flow of medication at the ready to make everything bad go away.