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Chapter 1
Dahlia
A seagull let out an obnoxious awk-awk-awk bleat, and I flinched awake. For a single instant, before the fuzziness of sleep slipped away, I thought I was back in the playhouse. The seagull’s cry, a guttural scream of pain from a victim. One second, I was ready to fight for my life, the next I was staring out across white sand beaches at the Ionian Sea.
“Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath.
It wasn’t as though I’d been dreaming of the house either. In fact, my dream had been pleasant and calm. Fading now, but a few vestiges of the fantasy still played across my mind. I’d been flying, like Peter Pan, across the ocean. Freedom. So much freedom that it had been intoxicating. Honestly, I wanted to shove a pen into the eye socket of that damned bird for waking me up and ruining it.
I adjusted my sunglasses and went about smearing myself down with another layer of sunscreen. The fall weather in Greece was much different from back home. Less humidity but still pleasantly warm during the day. For me, the water was a little too cool, but the beach was my favorite place to relax. Drake usually waited back at the house while I came here to unwind.
None of this felt real. As I rubbed lotion down my legs, I had to keep reminding myself, as I did a hundred times each day, that we were running for our lives. We’d gone into hiding, not a vacation, but in doing so, we had to fit in as though we were on a holiday. And we were doing a fucking good job of acting.
My life had been one long fucking nightmare, and the thought of doing anything but working, trying to survive, and keeping my sanity had always seemed beyond my ability. I’d never even taken a weekend away at some shitty campground, much less gone on Disney trips, cruises, or overseas vacations. Now, here I was on a Greek beach, sunbathing and greased up with suntan lotion. All around me, people strolled up and down the beach, oblivious to the things that really happened in the darker elements of life. They had no clue how harsh, painful, and bloody life could really be. Lucky fucks.
A crawling sensation traveled up my spine as I sat there. Fear shot through me, and I turned, glancing behind me. I knew that feeling. It had plagued me all my time in the playhouse. I was being watched. Someone somewhere was looking at me. Eyes roving my body, measuring, planning. My hand reflexively clamped down on the lotion bottle, sending a steam of white liquid across my legs like I’d just jerked off some gargantuan man and he’d finished on me.
“Fuck.” I hissed and wiped at it, but I continued to scan the surrounding beach, hunting for whomever was watching me.
“Hello,” a masculine and heavily accented voice said from beside me.
I spun back around, ready to fight, but finding only a gorgeously tanned and shirtless young man smiling at me. His smile was disarming and so white I might have had to squint if I hadn’t been wearing sunglasses.
“Yes?” The way the word came out was harsher and more panicked than I’d intended.
The young man, maybe in his early twenties like me, only grinned wider, and knelt down. His swim trunks were dripping water, and his black hair was wet and tossed back. He looked like a movie star.
“I see you read the book. Is it good?”
His broken English, accented in Greek, was charming. I glanced down at my chair and saw the book I’d been reading before slipping off into my nap. A gloriously smutty little paperback I’d picked up at a local bookstore that carried English as well as Greek titles.
“Oh,” I said and flipped the book over quickly, hiding the muscular and shirtless man on the front. “Yeah, it’s good. Thanks. Uh, can I help you?”
“I wonder if you would like to swim. Is hot. After? I keep you company? Have fun time?”
A hungry look darkened his eyes, not scary, but a flirtatiousness that probably worked with lots of nubile young American ladies looking to fuck a hot young Greek guy while on vacation. He was good. Very good at this. For a single moment, I imagined this man grunting and sweating as he screwed my brains out. But this young man was no Drake. Not even close.
In response I gave him a polite smile and gestured back to the beach house. “My, uh, boyfriend probably wouldn’t like that too much.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “He maybe likes to share? I share. Same time?”
Holy fuck, seriously? What a god damned horn dog.
“No thank you,” I said firmly.
He nodded and that same bright smile returned. “Is okay. See you later.”
He strolled along down the beach, and before he’d gone even fifty yards, he stopped at another umbrella to speak with two young college age girls. From the way the two women laughed and flirted it sounded like, if he played his cards right, he might be the one getting shared later.
The temptation to leave Drake had ebbed and surged over the last few months we’d been running. The lies and deceit had been so all-encompassing that I’d struggled with staying with him. The man had molded me into what basically amounted to a serial killer. He’d played a game with me, like a boy with an ant farm. Those arguments always faded away when I imagined being with anyone else though.
My life up until the day he brought me into the playhouse had been one where strength and power were things other people had. Drake had used his little house to torment me, yes, but it had also given me the one thing I’d always craved. Power. He’d brought me all the people who’d wronged me, all the ones who’d devastated me. Not only had he brought them to me, but he’d allowed me to destroy them in the most visceral way possible, and in giving me that opportunity, had made me love it. Even recalling the way they’d screamed and the feel of their blood on my fingers made me wet.
No, I couldn’t leave Drake. I could look past the deception. If I truly thought about it, he’d turned me into a wholly different person. A human that I actually liked. After taking lives, tearing screams from rendered bodies, and forcing men and women to beg for their lives, had turned me into the confident and assured woman I’d always wanted to be. When you knew how soft and easily destroyed a human life was, you had a hard time being intimidated by some dick in the grocery store or worrying that you’d piss off a horny Greek surfer dude.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I lay back on my chair again. For a few seconds I’d worried Sam may have found us and been watching me. It had only been mister I-want-to-spit-roast-you-with-your-boyfriend. Our true quarry, Sam, had done a pretty masterful job of hiding from us. Drake had shown an impressive array of research and detective skills during our search for him. It made sense given how he’d been able to find and kidnap all the evil fucks he and Sam had put into the playhouse with us. Yet Sam still eluded us. Drake had found almost nothing to lead us to the other man. After showing us the video he had, he’d as good as vanished. It had turned Sam into, basically, a mythical figure in my mind. A shadowy ghost that could be around any corner.
Down the beach, I watched as the two girls and the young man stood and walked back toward a beach house where the girls must have been staying.
