But her eyes barely glanced at my flat and empty stomach. She was more concerned with the fact that I was disheveled.
“He killed my baby,” I said. It amazed me how dead my voice sounded. How it lacked to invoke emotion in me that I was sure I had to have. Needed to have.
She flinched, the tiniest amount before she resettled her mask. “You miscarried. It happens.”
That should’ve hurt. The woman who birthed me, her utter brutal coldness toward what I’d lost. But it didn’t. Nothing could hurt me now.
I was dead.
You couldn’t hurt a dead thing.
“Yes,” I said. “It does happen when someone beats the shit out of a woman who’s eight months pregnant.”
She pursed her lips.
The sounds of the street behind us intensified in the ensuing silence.
“Why are you here?” she asked, like the words previous were of little consequence.
Then again, they were of little consequence to her.
I was of little consequence now that I’d lost my usefulness.
“Because I have nowhere else to go,” I whispered.
She inspected me, nothing in her eyes, not even a sliver of affection, of worry, of anything that would betray the fact that she was my mother. My blood.
“I suggest you find somewhere else.”
Then she closed the door in my face. I stood there, on the steps of my childhood home, numb. Glanced up at the beautiful brick, the high windows, the fortress I’d grown up in.
Not my home, I realized. Just another cage.
I was going to go from one cage to another because I didn’t know anything else. And my mother was right, I would find somewhere else. And it would be another cage, because I wasn’t strong enough for anything else.
I stood in the middle of the foyer, feeling quite the same numbness as I did that day on the steps of my family’s dwelling. At some point during my memory, I’d snatched my foot back and slammed the door.
I stared at those doors, and for once they didn’t stare back at me. They were just doors. Wood. Inanimate. Functional.
They would open into the world. They wouldn’t kill me. They were offering me something in the face of the truth.
I was staring at them because I couldn’t decide if they were offering me freedom or just another cage. I was staring at them because I couldn’t decide which was the one I was standing in right now.
And then I stopped standing.
I walked.
Into freedom or further into my cage.
I figured they were the same. It was just a matter of perception.
Four Days Later
All my life, I considered myself a little dead inside. Something in my blood, something not quite right, something that grew bigger, colder with every piece of horror or pain I experienced.
By the time I lost my baby, I was dead.
But even then, I had never felt as much of a zombie as I had the past four days, a ghost haunting the rooms of this house, terrified I’d see the man who made me this way. A depraved, wretched part of me wanted more.
Because I was depraved and wretched, and I’d always have the dead piece inside me. And with him, that didn’t feel like such a burden. Like such a fucking disfigurement.
I locked myself in my room for the first two days. Obviously he’d observed this, or at least Vera had, because three times a day, there was a quiet knock and then a rattling of a tray. I’d open the door to an empty hall and a plate of food and drink at my feet.
I’d stare at it, glare at it, toy with the idea of going on a hunger strike, just to spite him. But then I’d snatch it. Because I’d let him screw with—destroy—enough of my body. He wouldn’t starve me too.
I wanted to sleep. Sink into the bed and never wake up. But my brain wouldn’t let me. Sleep was a gift for the unburdened.
So I worked. Tirelessly. On every project I had currently and all future projects.
For the year.
I read four books. Gruesome. Gory. Enough to give a regular person grizzly nightmares.
But I wasn’t a regular person, and grizzly nightmares were my reality.
After two days, I couldn’t stand breathing the same air any longer. I longed for whatever meager freedom was offered.
So I tentatively left. Regained the routine I’d adopted when I’d first crawled from that bed.
Woke up.
Did my yoga.
Showered.
Clothed.
Breakfast.
Work.
Wandering.
Reading.
I added to it. I began to experiment, to actively work against the bars of my cage. Little things. I’d open windows, make myself sit and breathe the air for at least an hour. Then I’d force my head out the window, make myself look, make myself feel the outdoor air encircling my body. I’d time myself. The first attempt, I lasted three minutes forty-four seconds.
I was up to eighteen minutes four seconds.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. Some small hope that I might not be trapped in here forever.
It was inevitable that I’d encounter him.
I knew this.
I’d been waiting for it.
Craving it.
And I found the moment where a lot of our meetings had commenced. The dining room. It was dinner of the fourth day.
And he was sitting there.
But unlike all the rest of the times, he didn’t glance up at me and then back to his food. His eyes found mine the second I entered the room and they didn’t leave.
I knew this because I felt them, every step, every breath. But this time, I was the one to glance away, feign disinterest.
It cost me everything.
But I did it.
I got so far as to sit, put my napkin on my knees and get through half of the meal. It was like chewing and swallowing tinfoil. Every moment was pain.
But I could handle pain.
Lukyan taught me how.
But there was only so much my newfound tolerance could handle.
The knife and fork clattered onto my plate.
“I hate you,” I whispered, certainty and venom mixing to create marble out of my tone as I glared at him across the table.
He stared back. “Good,” he replied. “There’s purity in hate. A chance it in.”
“For what?” I demanded.
His gaze was even. Unyielding. “A chance that you still love me,” he said. “Because if you didn’t hate me, didn’t have rage boiling your blood and dilation in your pupils suggesting intense emotional fury, then I wouldn’t have a chance. And maybe, if it was truly over, I’d likely be dead. At your hands.”
I gaped at him, unable to grasp the concepts he was throwing at me and the cold certainty in which he was doing so. “I wouldn’t kill you for betraying me,” I spat. “I’m not in the business of murder.” Even as the words left my mouth I could taste the lie in them. Had I not progressed—or regressed, depending on your point of view—to the business of murder?
He inspected my pause. “I’m the one who encouraged you to abandon your humanity,” he said. “Therefore, I’m the one who’s going to face the brunt of the absence in the face of my sins.”
I laughed. “You don’t believe in God, so therefore you can’t believe in sin.”
“I believe in you,” he countered. “Therefore, any action to willfully harm you without due intent is a sin. The ultimate sin.”
I glared at him, hatred burning hot through my blood. Fury chased it because that hatred was still ruled by my hideous and wretched love for him. “You believe in me?” I asked. “Well I believe in fucking nothing, so I guess that puts us right back where we started, Lukyan. Nowhere.”
My chair squeaked backward, the sound gritty against the air. I threw my napkin on the table as I stood, like a bad actress in a worse Hollywood movie. Then I turned on my heel and walked out, slamming the door behind me.
I hated him. So much. Wanted to
run a million miles to escape from this.
So I ended up hating myself more. Because the only place I had to run to was the room I’d woken up in what felt like a lifetime ago.
Because I couldn’t go anywhere else.
My broken mind didn’t give me the strength to walk out that door, even when that world outside couldn’t possibly crush me more than Lukyan just did.
But then, when I least expected it, the outside world came rushing into that room.
And it punched me in the face.
Lukyan
He hadn’t been able to ingest a single item of food that entire meal. Hell, he’d barely been able to stomach anything the past four days. Mostly he’d just sat in his command room, watching her. Watching her every move, letting everything else fall away but her.
It wasn’t healthy.
It wasn’t logical.
He was overwhelmed with his capacity of feeling toward her words. Toward their last meeting. The things she said. The utter pain and betrayal in her beautiful eyes.
It was worse than any of the death he’d witnessed in countless eyes in the decades of his business.
She was going to be the death of him. That much was true. He knew it to his bone. He had always determined he’d leave this earth on his own terms.
But now he was certain it would be on hers.
He despised every second of the past four days. His skin was uncomfortable, unbearable on top of his flesh. His original plan was to wait patiently for her to recover enough to come to him. To let her make the first move. So he could regain the power.
But then, on the fourth day, he lost his patience.
His control.
His power.
And he didn’t give a fuck.
When she’d breezed through the dining room with nothing but a dismissive glance at him, it was a shard of glass through his chest cavity.
He expected her to crack. To fall apart and yell. Scream. At least look him in the fucking eye.
She did none of those things.
For fourteen minutes and eight seconds, all he heard was the sound of her utensils, the sound of her deafening silence. He was moments away from tossing his glass against the wall—losing his precious control—just to get something from her when she spoke.
When she declared her utter and real hatred for him.
And it was a relief.
Because there was something in hatred.
He could work with hatred.
After she’d stormed off, taking most of his sense with him, he’d sat silently at the table, thinking about what to do next. How to plan for the best outcome.
The best outcome being her in his bed, his dick inside her cunt and her riding him until they both forgot everything else. His fingers closed around his glass so tight with his need for her that it smashed. Small parts of glass embedded themselves in his palm and he plucked them out without wincing, watching the blood trickle down his hands.
He ached to draw hers again, smear it all over her milky skin when he fucked her. It was the thing he was about to do when his phone dinged.
Instantly, he was alert and the firearm taped underneath his table was in his hand as he strode over to the china cupboard. He pushed at the cabinet to reveal a modest arsenal. He had one for every room in the house.
Prepared for every eventuality.
And the ding on his phone told him some things.
That his father had betrayed him.
It wasn’t a surprise.
It was somewhat of a surprise that he’d been able to circumvent all Lukyan’s security in order to gain access to the grounds.
The ding on his phone was an alert that the last barrier to his home had been breached. Ordinarily, he’d get alerts with different sounds to say when someone turned off the side road that his driveway forked onto. Another when someone made it to the gate. So on and so forth.
But he’d had none of those.
So the sound on his phone gave him only precisely enough time to retrieve his firearms and watch three armed men approach the glass doors forking off his dining room.
No time to get to Elizabeth. To warn her.
Because there was likely to be more than those three. And they were likely to be tasked with finding Elizabeth. Either killing her or taking her to his father.
To Ana.
And Ana would rip her skin from her body just to spice up her evening. Ice crawled up his spine, unfamiliar in life-or-death situations.
Elizabeth would fight. He had trained her well. If they encountered her before he could dispatch the men walking casually toward the glass doors, she would do what needed to be done to survive.
He watched the men approach with cold calculation. They meant to kill him. And they outnumbered him. Neither of these things particularly worried him. He’d been stalking death for some time now. Since the beginning, most likely. That thing broken inside him, that had been born broken, it required it. A grim fascination with death. It promoted his way of life. And he was fascinated with his own demise more than any of the others he’d personally orchestrated.
He hadn’t put particular thought into his end. He’d known it would be bloody. Violent. That was the way of it. But he didn’t think it would be in the form of a small, broken, damaged and unhinged woman.
He thought he was the teacher of death, as well as the bringer of it. You brought about enough endings, you became somewhat an expert in the field.
But he’d known nothing.
She’d showed him death wasn’t a bullet to the head, the snapping of precise bones in the neck, the nick of the right artery. No, it was so much more painful and ugly than that.
It was fucking love. Or whatever warped version of the emotion he shared with her. That was the death he’d been stalking, and he hadn’t even realized it. If he had, he would’ve put a bullet in his own skull before all this had come to pass. But he didn’t. He was the living dead because of her, and he hated her as much as he loved her. But these men, they would not give him whatever kind of end that was left. Fuck no. He wasn’t scared of that final death. But he was terrified at what would come after his lights went out.
Of her death.
That would not happen.
Be it at his hands or God’s. That was the only way she was leaving this hunk of rock. And he’d be right behind her.
18
Elizabeth
The punch surprised me, but it didn’t knock me out. Or even to the floor.
I merely stumbled slightly, holding my cheek in a second of confusion.
The man who threw the punch was likely confused too, because it had enough force behind it to knock a woman out, or at the very least knock her to the floor.
I’m sure it would’ve worked on a lot of women, and it most likely worked for this man in the past, but I was not a lot of women. Lukyan had punched me harder than that.
And I’d survived.
I’d fought.
Which was what I instantly did the moment surprise left me. One look into the stranger’s eyes and I knew he was here to kill me. It was plain. It was the look that had been in Lukyan’s eyes the night he came into my house.
Death had abandoned me that night. Given me something of a chance.
I wouldn’t be so lucky this time around.
And I didn’t plan on luck having anything to do with it.
So I advanced on the large, muscled and hook-nosed man. He was trained, so he’d recovered from my lack of reaction to his punch seconds after I had. But he’d expected me to run, not to charge at him.
He still had enough time to lift his gun, but not enough to pull the trigger. I’d already identified the make and model—Lukyan had made me memorize all common and uncommon weapons used by professionals—and that meant I knew exactly where the magazine’s eject button was. In one move, I raised my hand and fastened it over the correct spot so the clip rattled to the ground. I used my other hand to slide back the hammer to eject the bullet in the chamber.
br /> It flew up and backward, bouncing off my attacker’s cheek.
Again, he was bewildered. But not enough.
He didn’t release his grip on his gun when I tried to rip it from him in order to coldcock him. Knowing I wouldn’t win an outright strength battle with him, I immediately released my grip, striking up with the heel of my hand to connect with his nose.
The resounding wet crunch and his gurgle of pain had me smiling. The gun rattled on the floor as both his hands went to his face, blood pouring out of his nose as he stumbled back.
I utilized every second of his pain and my upper hand by darting to my bed and reaching underneath to find the handle of the gun taped there.
Lukyan had guns in every room of the house. He’d taken the entire day to show me every single one. I had thought it was rather dramatic at the time, but now it was saving my life.
Not a second too late, I turned, the gun raised and my finger on the trigger. I squeezed without hesitation. The bullet landed beneath the man’s eyes, jerking him backward and spraying warm blood and brain matter on my cheek.
His body crumpled to the floor inches from me, his hands still closed around the knife that had been moments away from killing me.
Adrenaline coursed through my body, my senses acute and heightened. My heart was a hammer against my chest, everything moving slow and fast at the same time.
I didn’t have a moment to breathe, to think about what just happened. Lukyan’s security was extensive. That meant it had been bypassed. That meant there was more than one man.
Many more.
My heart suddenly stopped in my chest at the thought of one of them catching Lukyan unaware. Of a bullet tearing through his skull.
The gunshot that tore through my fear happened almost outside reality. It took me a long few seconds to realize that my arm was extended and I’d been the one to fire the bullet at the man coming from my bathroom.
Another head shot.
I’d practiced at least an hour a day with Lukyan.
He’d fashioned an indoor shooting range two months ago.
He had made sure that I had every skill available not just to survive in the outside world, but to battle in it.