by Brynn Ford
Her expression is taut and she bites her lip in agitation. “The key was for the cuff and I told you to put it back on before Nikolai comes to your room. How the hell did you get out of the room?”
I tilt my head. “I used the key. How the fuck do you think I got out?”
“But it only unlocks the…” Her eyebrows lift suddenly, widening her eyes, and her hand slaps over her mouth. “Oh, my God. I didn’t lock it.” She spins away and paces a few steps before whipping back around to look at me pointedly. “I forgot to lock the door.”
Anya’s hand drops to her chest and she swallows hard.
“You forgot?”
“I forgot. Oh, God. Ezra, I’m—”
Her voice catches and I see her chest rise and fall rapidly. In my adrenaline-spiked state, I’m tuned in and aware, and I can practically hear the air going in and out of her mouth as she slumps backward against the closed door.
She didn’t mean for me to escape.
She was just trying to give me the comfort of removing my ankle cuff.
I should be angry at the realization but seeing her panic over a mistake that could be costly to her softens me. It slows my rushing pulse. It makes me step back from the ledge. It makes me feel overcome with the need to comfort her.
“Hey,” I say, taking a slow step toward her.
She slides down the door gradually until she’s slumped on the floor.
“Anya, it’s okay. Listen. I’m out now and I can get you out of here, okay?” I try to reassure her. “I wasn’t going to leave without you.”
She looks up at me with a furrowed brow. “You came for me?”
There’s so much confusion and misunderstanding behind her blue eyes and all I want to do is make sure she knows I’m telling the truth. I should be getting her ass up and dragging her out of here before someone realizes I’m gone, but the privilege of staring into the haunting clarity of her eyes is challenging all my instincts.
I nod. “Of course I came for you. We’ve got a better chance together than we do alone.”
That’s when she blinks and turns her head away, hiding behind her icy shell. She pushes to her feet.
“I need to take you back to your room. Before Nikolai knows what happened. And you can’t tell him about this. Do you understand? You can’t ever tell him.”
I snap, “Anya. Are you out of your fucking mind? I’m not going back in there. We’re getting the fuck out of here. Now.” I grab her hand and then the doorknob.
She leaps in front of me, slamming her back against the door between us to keep it shut. I let go of the doorknob, but her hand is still in mine.
“No,” she insists. “There is no getting the fuck out of here.”
I step toward her. “What the hell do you mean? Let’s go.”
We’re chest to chest against the door and she’s not budging. “Ezra, listen to me. There is no escape. You can walk out the front door right now if you want, but you won’t make it a mile past the tree line.”
I huff, looking down at her.
“There are wolves in the forest. He feeds them, draws them closer to the manor. Even if that wasn’t a concern, the forest stretches for God knows how far, and it’s dense. Overwhelming and disorienting. I know because I escaped once. I was lucky that Nikolai came after me. I wouldn’t have survived another hour lost in that freezing forest if he hadn’t found me. There is no escape.”
That’s enough to give me pause and the pause makes me realize how close we’re standing to one another. I take a small step back as the realization makes my ab muscles clench in a way that I don’t want them to clench for her. I drop her hand and turn, pacing away from her a few steps.
“So, you’ve escaped before and didn’t make it.”
“It was a hopeless, useless attempt. I just didn’t know better. I don’t want you to make the same mistake of thinking there’s any hope at all of making it out of here alive.”
I whip around to look at her. “That’s bullshit. There’s always hope.”
“You’re wrong. Here, there’s only survival and you have to follow the rules if you want that. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to believe something different.”
She pushes away from the door and steps forward, brushing past me to cross to an ornate dresser against the far wall, on the opposite side of her meticulously made bed. She bends to pull open a drawer at the bottom. She takes out a small cardboard box, about the size of a shoebox, though it’s covered in a pink and green floral print. Soft pink roses, I notice, and think it seems so perfectly fitting for her.
Soft and pretty and blooming, protected by unyielding thorns.
She turns to face me, holding it in her arms as though it’s a puppy or a child that needs to be tended to with care. We both walk toward one another and meet at the end of her queen-sized bed. She lifts the lid, flipping it over onto the mattress.
“Photos?”
She nods, carefully pulling the photo at the very end of the neatly lined row out of the box. She holds it up to me, showing me a picture of a young girl, probably in her early teens. She’s sitting on a city stoop, looking down at a cell phone in her hands. I realize her features are similar to Anya’s as I look up at her face then back down at the photo. The girl’s hair is brown, but a little more golden than Anya’s, and shorter.
“Is she family?” I ask and she nods.
“My sister. Lidia. She was fourteen here. Turn it over.”
I flip the photo over and find scribbling on the back.
Two numbers.
Fourteen and thirty-five.
“This is the first picture Nikolai brought me when I arrived here at Mikhailov Manor. Lidia was fourteen years old at the time. I had only just turned twenty-one.”
“What’s thirty-five?”
“Thirty-five yards,” she says.
She takes the picture from me and puts it back inside the box. She plucks the photo from the front end of the row and shows it to me.
“This is from last week. She’s seventeen now. Her eighteenth birthday will be in a few months.”
I look over at Anya and see the small curve of a smile on her lips. But then she frowns as she flips it over.
Again, two numbers.
Seventeen and fifty.
“Fifty yards. It’s the scope measurement from a rifle trained on her when they took the photograph. I get one picture a week. Every year for the past three years.”
I’m speechless.
She hands me the photograph and paces away, crossing her arms over her chest. I briefly thumb through some of the other photographs in the large stack, careful not to disturb her carefully ordered row.
“Nikolai’s reach is vast, Ezra.” She lowers to sit on a cream-colored ottoman near the corner window and I’m momentarily distracted by the sunlight behind her. “If I could somehow even manage to survive the wilderness and find a way back to the real world, it wouldn’t matter. She’d be dead within the week. Or worse.”
“What’s worse than death?”
She lifts her head and meets my eyes. “This.”
An eerie prickle creeps along my spine in understanding. What I’ve endured over the past couple of weeks pales in comparison to the hell she’s been put through. I saw first-hand what Nikolai has done to her, the violation of his fingers twisting inside her. There’s no telling what he had to do before that to break her, to break a woman like Anya, who is obviously so strong.
The thought of it nauseates me and provokes some weird caveman compulsion that makes me feel fiercely protective of her. I set down the photo and go to her, crouching on my haunches in front of her. Her eyes widen at my bold presence and she sits a bit straighter to pull away from me, though I don’t budge.
“We have to work together, okay? If we work together, we can figure a way out of this.”
&n
bsp; “You’re not hearing me. There is no way out of this. It’s not just Nikolai. It’s an entire empire that reaches across the globe.”
“What kind of empire?”
She sighs. “The Mikhailovs are in the business of stealing and selling.”
“What, like drugs? Weapons?”
She shakes her head. “No. People.”
“You’re telling me they’re selling people?”
“Yes.” She nods. “He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to keep us here. He knows how to control us.”
I give her a small, tilted smile. “Well, the joke’s on him. I don’t have any family he can hold me hostage with.”
She sighs and her shoulders slump, the movement swaying her toward me. I swear I can feel her soul push against mine.
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t leave. Neither can I. All we can do is survive.”
“And how do we do that? Play by his stupid fucking rules?”
“Yes.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I can do that.”
She leans all the way forward and grabs my face in both hands. “You have to, Ezra. You have to.”
I know just how fucked I am when she touches me, when I see the tears of desperation glass over her eyes as she pleads with me. She’s the kind of girl a guy like me has a hard time saying no to. I don’t want to say no to her. I have the fleeting thought that I wish I knew what she was like in the real world, and I feel my heart tug tight against my chest.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, I get it. But if I put my trust in you that this is what we need to do, I want you to know that puts you on the line. That makes you responsible for my well-being.”
A flicker of acknowledgement then acceptance crosses her eyes, and I know she understands me with the way it twists in my gut.
“I know. I just need you to follow the rules. It’s less painful for me when you do.” She lets her hands fall away from my face and they briefly land on my knees before falling away entirely. “I have to take you back to your room. I have to lock you in before he finds you. You’re not allowed to be here, especially without Kostya.”
I shake my head. “I can’t. I can’t go back there.”
“You have to. There’s no other choice. But I swear, I won’t leave you there, okay? We just need to convince Nikolai that I’ve broken you. That you kneel for me now. If we can convince him of that, then you’ll have more freedom in the house.”
I put my hands on my knees and push up to stand, lacing my fingers together on the top of my head as I spin and pace. I feel her coming up behind me and I drop my hands to my sides, spinning to face her. Her fingers graze mine as she reaches to hold my hand and I snatch both of hers in mine, desperately craving the small moment of affection.
“I know it’s hard,” she says softly, “I know. He kept me in isolation for months when he brought me here.”
She survived this for months?
If she could get through it for months, I could certainly manage a little while longer.
I sigh and before I even understand why I’m doing it, I step forward and wrap my arms around her petite frame, pulling her into a hug. She doesn’t recoil and I’m thankful for that, though I can sense she doesn’t know how to respond.
I’m immediately aware of the fact that I haven’t showered in a week, other than to splash some water on the most important parts of my body from the faucet in my bathroom. I wish I smelled better for her, and that seems like a petty fucking thought in all this.
I inhale the scent at the top of her head. It’s floral and fragrant and bursting with life. It’s the scent of fresh cut roses and I can’t stop myself from kissing the top of her head. That chaste kiss is what melts her and she presses into me, slipping her arms through mine to wrap around my waist. She lets her head rest against my chest and all I can think of is standing here and holding her.
I really, honestly don’t want to let her go.
But the startling sound of the door clicking open kickstarts my heart to get ready to fight for my life, to fight for her life, to fight for our lives.
Chapter 11
Anya
One moment warm arms encapsulate me, and the next, they’re shoving me away. The click of the door startles us both. Just when I think things are going to be okay, that I’ve gotten through to Ezra, that he understands why we have to play by the rules and submit to survive, it all comes crashing heavy upon our heads.
I fully expect that Ezra will jump into action and rush the door, but I hadn’t expected him to do this. He pushes me out of his embrace, farther back into the room, then spins lightning fast and steps forward toward the door, standing protectively between me and the oncoming threat.
I have a moment of hope, dangerous flashing hope, that it’s only Kostya coming into my room. But Kostya always knocks and he only comes to collect me when Nikolai calls for me. I know it’s Nikolai before I even see him.
“Ezra,” I warn, fully expecting to see him launch himself at Nikolai on the attack.
Instead, Ezra steps backward, holding a hand behind him, as if the palm of his outstretched arm could form a protective shield around me. No one, not one of the three men before him, would have done that for me.
My heart skips across an unwilling beat.
Nikolai is seething at the door, though he has yet to cross the threshold. His fingers roll methodically into fists at his sides.
What do I do?
What the hell do I do?
There’s only one thing I can think of.
“On your knees, mal’chik,” I say to Ezra, hoping he’ll know, praying he’ll understand.
He glances back at me, but it’s quick, and then he’s watching Nikolai again, bouncing with feral energy.
“Mal’chik,” I snap at him through gnashed teeth.
He looks at me and I think he sees the meaning in my stare. I think he understands that we have to pretend this is nothing more than me training my slave.
I’ll be punished for this regardless.
Nikolai has found me alone in my room with the boy.
But I may be able to lessen the severity of the consequence—at the very least, for Ezra’s sake—if we can convince him that this is nothing but bad judgment on my part.
Gradually, thankfully, Ezra comes into understanding. There’s a slight bob to his head and he nods to me, lowering to his knees. It’s slow movement, his body is rigid with tension and ready to jump back up on a dime if this turns into a fight.
I need him to see that it can’t always be a fight.
It only makes things worse.
It only gives Nikolai a reason to punish us.
I slip deep within the borders of my soul to guard myself as I find my shield and step forward courageously, moving in between Ezra and Nikolai. Ezra’s agitation is so visceral, it’s as if I can feel his pulse through my own, and that connection is unnerving, unsteadying.
I lower to kneel in front of Nikolai, bowing my head in contrition.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m not supposed to bring him to my room. I wanted to show him the photographs of Lidia. I wanted to make him understand.”
“Quiet, rabynya,” he snaps, “Come with me, both of you.”
He’s growling, practically salivating in territorial possession, reminiscent of the night I once tried to escape and found myself face to face with a snarling gray wolf.
There are wolves outside but an equally dangerous one within, and I’m currently his prey.
I rise to my feet. “Da, khozyain,” I turn my head toward Ezra. “Come, mal’chik.”
His brow furrows, but somehow, he manages to get control of his questioning expression. With a shake of his head, he gets to his feet with a clenched jaw.
Nikolai leads us both out of the room, down the hall toward the grand staircase.
My heart thumps wildly against my ribs as I open my stride to keep up with his long steps.
I don’t know what he’s thinking.
He’s silent as we walk, and that’s more terrifying to me than if he were to yell and scream and throw me against the wall and hurt me.
There’s feral, male energy all around me, one pulsing with ill-intent, the other with ferocious goodness. It’s overwhelming the way that it ropes its way around and tugs at me from both sides.
Nikolai nearly runs down the grand staircase and I quickly follow behind, not looking back, simply hoping that Ezra is keeping up and following as he’s supposed to. Any step out of line from Ezra right now will only make whatever the hell we’re heading toward worse, likely for me.
Nikolai reaches the bottom of the staircase several steps ahead and stops beside Kostya, who is already standing there in wait. He spins around to face us as we chase toward him.
When my foot falls onto the landing, Nikolai snaps, grabbing me by the scruff of my neck. I shriek and my shoulders instantly tense as his heavy hand pushes down on the back of my neck. I know immediately he wants me on the ground, but my body still pushes back against the force.
He bends down as he pushes harder, hissing against my ear, “Crawl, rabynya.”
I respond to his command and slump to my knees on the hard marble, catching myself on my hands as he releases me with a flick of his wrist that tosses my weight forward. Nikolai walks again, striding forward with the confident steps of a shrewd businessman on his way to roll heads. The click of his sleek dress shoes across the marble reverberates in my bones as I follow him on my hands and knees.
I feel Ezra moving faster toward me and I see him coming up along my side.
“Behind me,” I insist. “Don’t make this worse.”
“Fuck!” The tremble in his voice ripples over my skin.
His voice is tinged with agitation and fear. Thankfully, he falls back in line, though I can see him twitch with frantic, nervous energy.
I know Ezra isn’t accustomed to this sort of behavior, but I wish he would come to terms with our circumstances faster. His concern makes this feel so much worse, in a truly unique and thoroughly revolting manner.