by Nicole Fox
And instead, I turn to her.
She looks up at me from between her shaking fingers. Then slowly, she puts them down. She doesn’t seem altogether aware of what’s happening. It’s as if she’s looking at me and seeing me, but can’t quite figure out who I am.
She knows damn well who I am—she said so herself. I’ve known you my entire life.
I squat down in front of her. Slowly, so that I don’t spook her. When her brown eyes meet mine, I’m engulfed by the strangest sense of déjà vu. It’s like I’m being pulled back into the past. Like I’m looking into the eyes of a terrified little girl again, drenched in her father’s blood.
I shake it off. Maybe Cillian’s right. Maybe I am getting soft.
I need to course-correct quickly. I don’t have room in my life for sentiment. I don’t have the luxury of being distracted. Not even by eyes as beautiful as hers.
“Renata?”
She blinks, and for a second, I think she’s going to reach out and touch me. Her fingers twitch as though she’s actively fighting the urge.
“I know you,” she murmurs, her words slurring slightly.
I realize her eyes are dilated. Rokiades must’ve drugged her with something. That motherfucker.
There’s the anger again. Strong and uncontrollable. And extremely fucking specific. I’ve never felt anything like it before and it stumps me for a moment. But I squash it down.
“Renata,” I say again. “It’s me. It’s Kian.”
She frowns. “Kian?” She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it. Then she squints at me.
“Are you okay?”
“Everything hurts.” Her voice is small, almost girlish.
I’ve never seen her like this. Passive. Afraid. Searching. Actually, that’s not true. I have seen her like this—once before. But she was five at the time. And I’d just murdered her father right in front of her.
Everything hurts. Why do my insides feel like they’re caving in at those words? It shouldn’t matter to me that she’s hurting. Hadn’t I myself given the order to have her killed only a night ago? Hell, I should execute her now and be done with it.
But every cell in my body is screaming at me to do the opposite instead. To protect her. To console her. To keep her safe.
“Come with me,” I tell her gently.
She stares at me for a long time. “I know you,” she says again, as though she’s still trying to figure out. “You’re… you’re a monster?”
The way she says it, it’s like a question. The asshole really did a number on her. A shiver passes down her spine and I can see the hair on her arms standing on end. It’s starting to worry me.
“Renata, come on. We don’t fucking have time for this.”
“You’re going to use me. Like him.”
“I’m nothing like him,” I bite, causing her to shrink back.
“You are,” she says, but her voice is still small, and she sounds like she’s talking to herself. “You’re all alike. All you know is how to cause pain.”
I grab her hand, but surprisingly, she doesn’t shake me off. She just looks at the space where our skin meets as though it’s fascinating to her.
Warmth enters the tips of my fingers and travels through my arms until it reaches my body. I’m getting impatient now. Not with her, but with myself.
I need to get a fucking grip.
“Get on your feet,” I tell her firmly.
When she doesn’t move, I grab her by the shoulders and pull her upright. She stands easily enough, but the color drains from her face almost immediately.
“Renata?”
Her eyes roll and she collapses backwards against the wall.
And that’s when I see it.
There’s blood everywhere...
From the gunshot wound in her stomach.
18
Renata
It’s the noise that jostles me awake. The sound feels almost oppressive as it bears down on my eardrums like a banshee shrieking into the night. My head is throbbing and the rest of me isn’t so far behind.
I have no fucking clue where I am. Or who I’m with. And given my track record lately, I’m not super hopeful.
I’m nervous to open my eyes, mostly because I don’t want anyone to notice I’m awake. I can hear the sound of men talking. They’re yelling at the top of their lungs, but the sound of the chopper drowns out their words.
Wait… chopper?
I’m in a helicopter. And I feel utterly bizarre.
I’m in pain, but it feels like there’s a layer of numbness that’s blunting the sharp edge of it. It’s still there, lingering in the background like a monster in the closet. But something is keeping it at bay.
The more aware I become, I can’t keep to resist the curiosity of opening my eyes a tiny sliver and taking a quick look around. I’m lying flat on something. A bed? No, there’s a rail under my fingertips. A gurney, perhaps? But there is someone sitting right beside me.
His name is right on the top of my tongue. Frustratingly, it keeps slipping away, just when I think I finally have it.
Then he speaks. His voice sluices through the thunder of the helicopter blades, deep and rasping, weathered but strong. It’s not a kind voice. Not a gentle voice. And even though I’m drawn to it, it still terrifies me.
I wonder what that says about who I am. That I’m a masochist? A sucker for pain? That fear is what fuels me?
I don’t like any of the plausible answers to those questions.
Frowning, I open my eyes completely and turn my head to the side. The man sitting next to me notices that I’m awake. I want so badly to remember his name. But that numbness is hiding it from me. My tongue feels thick and uncooperative in my mouth.
His eyes land on mine and for maybe half a second, I’m able to admire the stark handsomeness of his features without the guilt. And then his name snaps back into my memory. And I reel back.
I can’t stand or straighten up. The moment I try, pain shoots up my body as though I’ve been electrocuted.
What has he done to me?
I start screaming because words just won’t come. Maybe I’m trying to drown out the noise from the helicopter we’re in.
I twitch a second time and again, pain rips through me. I collapse back against my makeshift bed, sweating from the effort. My screams dwindle somewhat, but only because I’ve shocked my body into retreating back into unconsciousness.
I’m losing sight again.
I’m losing sound.
It feels like I’m losing my grip on reality.
And at the moment, that sounds pretty damn good.
I drift in and out of dreams. Some of them are boring and forgettable. Most of them are scary. Projections of my deepest, darkest fears.
I think of him. I still refuse to say his name. To even think his name. The monster who stole my youth and made me his personal captive.
He’s not the only one who’s ruined me.
I think about the monster I was wed to. Married off, like I was nothing more than a commodity to be bought and sold.
Drago told me it was my duty. That I needed to make sacrifices. But where were his sacrifices? Why was I the only one forced to suffer for the sake of the family honor? Why was I the one being fed to the beast?
Every time I see that beast’s face, even in my dreams, my body reacts, desperate to throw him off before he becomes fully realized.
I thought I buried him deep. I thought I had squashed his memory with strength.
But all I’d really done was suppress fears that were always lying in wait, dormant but ready to spring to life at a moment’s notice.
My head is clouded with a fog I can’t explain. I can’t feel my body at all. It makes me wonder if I’m dying. But the pain still persists and that tells me that I’m still clinging to life.
Only life can hurt this bad.
I’ve always imagined death to be something like floating. You rid yourself of all your earthly shackles and just…
fly away. Like running faster and faster until you outrun everything—gravity, reality, all of it.
Until there’s nothing to hold you back. And no one to haunt you.
The dreams finally subside. I’m so tired that my mind gives up the ghost, stops conjuring memories of my broken, twisted past.
I’m okay with that. The past is exhausting.
When I finally open my eyes, it feels like I’ve been sleeping for days. I’m numb all over, my stomach feels hollow, and yet, I’m not hungry at all.
I’m lying in a massive bed in a room that’s actually quite beautiful. The walls are a light cream. The floors are gleaming hardwood. The edge of the carpet I can see is a soft, pastel blue that draws in the light coming through the arched windows on the far side of the room.
“How are you feeling?”
The voice elicits a gasp. I twist my neck to the side so fast that I feel it crack. I wince before realizing that Kian has been standing by my bedside this entire time and I never even noticed.
“What are you—”
I try and move, but there’s resistance around my wrists.
I look down at my wrists and realized I’m cuffed to the bedposts. One arm chained in each direction.
Kian watches me, unblinking. His beard looks riddled with gray today, more so than usual. It glistens silver in the light.
“If you behave, I’ll take them off.”
I grit my teeth, feeling anger burn through my body. It actually feels good. Anger is a much more useful emotion than fear is. I’ve often thought that anger pushes you into action, while fear just debilitates you. And I’ve had enough debilitation for one lifetime.
“Take them off now,” I hiss.
My words sound strange. I actually croak a little as I speak. Apparently, I haven’t used my voice in a long time. It sounds rusty.
“No,” Kian demurs. “I think you might need them a little longer.”
“I need them a little longer?” I ask. “Or you do?”
He gives me a hard smile. “You had a rough week.”
Week? So that’s why I feel like I’ve been asleep for days. Because I actually have been.
“How long?”
“It’s been four days since I found you at the club with Rokiades,” he tells me. “I’ll admit, I was shocked to find you in there with him. It wasn’t until hours later, after I spoke to Emile, that I pieced together what happened.”
“Emile?” I ask, trying to put the pieces together myself. My life over the last week feels a bit like a patchwork quilt.
“My maid,” he explains. “She comes to the penthouse a few times every week to clean it for me.”
My body goes cold when I remember the kindly older woman who had unwittingly released me from my claustrophobic little cell.
“What did you do to her?” I demand.
He raises his eyebrows, clearly taken back by the anger in my voice. “Excuse me?”
“You fucking heard me!” I snap, straining against my cuffs. “What did you do to her? Where is she?”
I notice that the ring of raw skin from where I’d tugged at the previous set of cuffs has been treated with some kind of antiseptic ointment. I don’t know what to make of that, so I decide not to think about it at all.
“Emile is probably at the penthouse right now, cleaning,” he says with a shrug. “I did nothing to her, apart from keeping her employed.”
“You… you didn’t kill her?”
He cocks his head to the side, a slight frown playing across his eyebrows. “Why would I have killed her?”
“She let me go. I escaped because of her.”
“She didn’t know you were in that wardrobe. And that was my fault. I expected to have dealt with you before she arrived. I forgot.”
I’m only vaguely aware that my mouth is hanging open as I stare at him. I snap it shut, not entirely sure if I believe what he’s saying.
“She didn’t want to let me escape. I forced her to give me the security code. I… I choked her…”
“Well, that’s not very nice. Didn’t know you had it in you. You should probably send Emile a fruit basket or something.”
I don’t know why, but I feel the need to explain myself. To justify my brutish actions. I’m not like you, I want to scream. I would never hurt someone innocent.
“I was desperate and starved for oxygen,” I ramble. “I knew that if I stayed, you’d kill me and… and…”
“You decided you wanted to live at any cost,” he says simply.
Even now, I don’t understand my need to survive. There was a time when I’d dreamed of death. Prayed for it, even. Which is saying something, since I stopped believing in a higher power a long, long time ago.
But lately, I’ve fought so hard to keep breathing. It’s the one instinct I thought the beast had forced out of me a long time ago.
No. Don’t think about him now. Or ever. Put him back in the box and lock the key.
Somehow, the ordeal I’ve been through the last couple of days has pulled down the defenses I spent years building in my head and heart. All my demons have been allowed to come out and play. Pushing them back in again is harder than I expected.
“If Emile is at the penthouse,” I ask, “then where are we?”
“We’re at my mansion in the Hamptons,” he replies.
“Fuck off. Seriously, where are we?”
He chuckles. “Come again?”
“Your mansion? In the Hamptons? Fuck off.”
Kian smirks. “Listen.”
“To what?”
“Shh. Just listen.”
I scowl, but I shut up and do as he says. Cocking my ear towards the window, I wait for something to happen.
And then I hear it. It takes me a second to understand what I’m hearing. But suddenly…
“The ocean.”
“Smart girl.”
“We’re really in the Hamptons.”
He nods, eyes solemn. “I never lie.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Why what?”
“Why bring me here?”
He takes longer than I expect to answer. Which only makes me pay closer attention. His expression is well-practiced. It gives nothing away. But every person has tells—somewhere. I just have to find Kian’s.
He answers my question with one of his own. “What do you last remember?”
“I remember getting out of your luxurious prison wardrobe and… walking around the city aimlessly,” I start.
It’s more for my benefit than his. I need to remember what exactly led me into the beast’s lair.
“I remember being hungry. I needed to use the bathroom, too. I stumbled across this restaurant. I went inside. Then this guy showed up and… he took me to a back room and locked me in there.”
I fumble around, trying to remember what happened next. It comes to me in a flash like lightning, hot, jarring, and painful.
“Then that old fucking pervert walked in.”
“Yannis,” Kian supplies.
“Who?”
“Yannis Rokiades,” Kian tells me. “The Greek don.”
I sigh. “Yes. That’s the one. He took me back to his club and I’m pretty sure he slipped me something—”
“Ecstasy.”
“The drug?”
He looks like he’s about to smile, but he kills it quickly. “Yes, the drug, not the emotion. He must have mixed it with something else because you were very confused and disoriented when I found you. But then again, you had also been shot.”
“What?”
“You don’t remember that part?”
“I… no,” I tell him, horrified that I can’t pinpoint that. Surely, getting shot is something a person remembers?
I look at my body, maybe for the first time since I’ve woken up. I’m wearing soft cotton pajamas. And beneath them, on my abdomen, is a mass of gauze bandages.
So that’s where the pain is coming from.
“Who shot me?” I ask.
H
e narrows his eyes. “Why does that feel like an accusation?”
“If you didn’t do it, then it’s not.”
“Why would I shoot you?”
“You’ve been trying to kill me since we met.”
He snorts. “True. But I’ve had ample opportunity to kill you up until now.”
He’s right. He could have just smothered me in my sleep if he had really wanted me dead. It’s small comfort, though.
“I’m an excellent shot,” Kian continues. “Trust me—it wasn’t my bullet that got you.”
“Trust you?” I scoff sarcastically. “Sure, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Need I remind you that, without me, you would have been raped?”
The word sends another bolt of pain through my body. But this time, it’s all internal. There’s no amount of time that’ll heal the scars inside of me. Thanks to the drug cocktail that Greek asshole fed me, everything feels so fucking fresh. I look down, trying to stuff my feelings back inside the cave they’ve been unearthed from.
When I look back up again, Kian is staring at me searchingly. “Let me guess: your brother planned on marrying you off to Yannis.”
Even his name sounds sinister.
“My brother is a coward,” I snap, not even caring how Kian interprets that. “This was probably the easiest thing for him to do that would increase his power.”
I don’t have to speak to my brother to know what he was thinking. It’s not like I don’t know what he’s capable of. But I did think I was safe from this kind of thing.
Especially since I feel like I’ve paid my dues. Drago tried this once before. It almost killed me. He swore he’d never do it again. That he’d keep me safe. And, fuck me, I believed him.
I see now how naïve that was. The silly, desperate hope of a girl who had nothing else to cling to.
Kian scoffs. “Yannis Rokiades is not the type of man to just give up power,” he says. “He would have married you and killed your brother.”
“At this point, I don’t care.”
He raises his eyebrows and I feel the need to clarify.
“I meant the last part,” I say quickly. “I don’t care if he’d decided to kill my brother.”