Page 52 of Her Creation

Once at the top of the stairs, she hurled herself through the door and bolted it, her fingers fumbling the latch. Lightning tore through the sky, a violent, bone-white rupture that flooded the room with light. For a brief, merciless instant, a shape bloomed in the doorway behind Victoria, tall, unmoving, and carved from pure darkness, before the shadows slammed back into place.

The fine hairs along the nape of her neck lifted, as if her body recognized the danger before her mind thought to name it. Breath held tight in her chest, she felt the unbearable weight of a gaze press into her spine, pinning her where she stood.

Slowly, her eyes traveled upward along the iron door: over the scarred metal, the rivets, the seams stained with age and wear, until she stood fully upright, rigid as a corpse staked in place. She didn’t turn to look. She didn’t need to.

Victoria knew, with a certainty that hollowed her from the inside out, that he was standing behind her—and that he was watching. Waiting for her next move. She let out a slow breath and spun.

Lightning lashed across an empty room as she pressed her back against the door. A floorboard creaked above Victoria’s head—he wasn’t behind her. He’d gone upstairs.

Stepping out of the room with shaking legs, she made her way up the stairs to the second floor. About halfway up the stairs, a heaviness pressed at her back. She turned to see the large, shadowed figure at the foot of the stairs. He hadn’t gone up the stairs yet, but she was now trapped from going back down.

A low, rough sound came from the man’s throat. Several strikes of lightning flashed, illuminating them both.

He was so different from the man she had cried to. The man she had loved. Everything about him was powerful and harsh. His once beautiful, still face was now sharp and serious and filled with silent, barely contained rage. No longer did Victoria doubt he was everything awful that her father had heard.

“Wraith of Serbia,” she muttered under her breath, remembering what her father had told her about him being dangerous beyond understanding.

The man stepped toward her.

“How am I here?”

Victoria’s head snapped back, startled by the low, rough voice, hints of a barely there Russian accent harshening the words.

Lightning flashed—a quick one this time, but enough to show the beveled edges of his wide shoulders and the outline of muscles on his arms and thighs in the small linen drawers they had put on him. The moonlight from the window glinted off the ridges of his chest and stomach, the sharp V that dug into his lower body, barely covered by the loose, white cloth.

Victoria sucked a breath in. Lying down, dead and mangled, this man’s body had been something rare and unusual. Alive, he was indescribable. Unlike anything the world had ever seen. The confidence of a hundred kings contained in a haunted suit of armor. His calmness was a direct opposition to Victoria’s panic.

When he stood to his full height, Victoria could feel the air in the room tuck against her skin, flinching away from the creature. Perhaps it wasn’t flinching, but instead, pressing against her skin, as there was no more room for it with the weight of his presence taking up the space.

A crack of thunder boomed as though it had severed the earth in half, the man stepped toward her, and her body shot to life, sending her up the final steps and down the hallway.

There were only so many places on the second floor she could get to fast enough, and not one of them gave her a way to get back down to the first floor easily. Even in her grief-ridden exhaustion, she knew better than to cage herself into a space she couldn’t escape from. She never heard him but felt the weight of his constant glare press at the skin of her back as she ran. The pounding of her heart whooshed in her ears, dulling her hearing as she struggled to listen for him behind her.

Suddenly she was standing in the last room on the second floor. Her eyes closed in frustration as she realized the rooms didn’t loop together like they did on the third and fourth floors and she’d have to go back down the hallway to get to the stairs, which he no doubt had already cleared. Dust floated through the air over the furniture covered with beige sheets as she clamored about. There was nowhere to go.

The floor creaked behind her, and she had no choice but to run to the nearest piece of dusty furniture and tuck herself under the old love seat. Her tongue clung to the inside of her dry mouth, but she dared not swallow for fear it would be too loud and give away her location.

Knees tucked under her, her spine rubbed against the rough underside of the seat. A staccato of lightning flashes came, and Victoria squinted to look through the linen draping around the sofa like a skirt. She struggled not to cry out when the darkened shape of his feet stepped inside the doorway.

Bloodied fingers filled her mouth with a copper tang as she pressed her middle and pointer knuckles against her teeth, suffocating the screams that threatened to tear from her lungs.

His feet were silent as they stepped closer. Closer. Victoria had to close her eyes as bile rose up to her throat as his feet stopped next to the sofa. Too close. Victoria would have only had to move her hand out of the sheet an inch to graze his enormous foot.

Fear clawed into her naked chest. What would he do if he found her? She couldn’t let him leave the castle, though.

Her eyes pounded to the rampant beat of her heart as she waited for what would happen next. Did he know she was under the sofa? Was that why he had stopped? She prayed he’d keep walking.

Suddenly Victoria’s stomach was sliding against the dust-layered floor as pressure tightened around her ankle, and the fabric covering the sofa brushed over the back of her head as she was pulled from under it.

He had ahold of her.

With his great height, he had bent over the sofa and pulled her out while she still watched him on the other side. Feeling his grip release, Victoria attempted to scurry away, the peddling of her feet and body squeaking against the polished wooden floor, not stopping her until she flipped over and crawled away as gasps and horrified pleas left her mouth.

She reached the wall and clawed at the thick wood baseboard to get closer, turning until her back pressed against it like a frightened, cowering animal.

Her heart stalled when his familiar scarred chest filled her vision. She was trapped.

He sat on the floor, just out of reach, an indifferent expression on his severe features. His patched skin tinted with a silver haze as moonlight pooled around him as he sat completely still on his knees only a few feet away. His gaze burrowed into the horror Victoria felt—she closed her eyes and felt warm tears slide down her cheeks and onto her bare, crouching thighs.