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I yanked free of Levi without responding and left, ignoring his shouts as I stepped through the door Nikolai held open for me.
Nikolai drove back to the penthouse and I stared out the window, thinking on what Gabby and I had just cemented into action. Outside, the picture hardly
changed. I was sure there were things I couldn’t see, things beyond twinkling lights and falling snow.
“Nikolai?” I called out, turning from the window. His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Would you tell me something about yourself? Something the Beast doesn’t know.” Something that lets me know your true motives.
His eyes went back to the road. “I don’t think that is wise.” Pulling my lips together thinly, my gaze flicked back out the window. I just wanted something—no matter how small—beyond the Beast. Something to remind me that there would be a life beyond this tinted one. Something besides him that I could grasp on to.
“We all have our parts to play, mistress,” Nikolai said, drawing my gaze back to his mirrored one. “If you break form before the play ends, then you risk letting the audience in.” My brow furrowed, eyes still locked with Nikolai’s in the mirror. Slowly his gaze shifted as we came up to traffic and I redirected mine to my lap.
I still didn’t even know his last name. I was basically going to war with this guy but I didn’t know anything substantial.
Ruby colors from brake and streetlights cast a glow over my hands as I fiddled with my pants. I wondered if I was in over my head, and it wasn’t the first time I’d done so. Since trading myself to the Beast, I’d been treading water in a storm. I never imagined this, though, me playing a part as princess to take down a mafia Boss.
A part that would erase the girl I once was.
I looked out the window as the car resumed speed. I could hardly remember who she was anyway, what she used to do. Frankie Notte…she had dreams. She wanted to travel the world. She taped up pictures on her wall of places to see, a bucket list of things to do, from seeing Tokyo to Times Square at New Year’s. She wanted to find true love, as most people do, that one person who matches you unequivocally. That one person who is so much your half that once you find them it becomes starkly, painfully real how incomplete you were without them. Without them, it would be like trying to ride a bike without wheels.
Suddenly life just doesn’t work.
I wanted that.
With a jagged sigh, I dug a nail into my palm, trying to stymy the thoughts of Beast that flowed through my heart at the thought of love. Darkness settled into the car as Nikolai pulled into the garage. We all have our parts to play, he said. I knew my part. It was the lead role, and the most important one. Junior high me would have been flipping out, because she really wanted the lead in the musical before she got too sick to audition.
Now I not only wished I could be recast, I really wished I could just drop out of the play, go home, and play soccer or something instead. I knew deep in my marrow that once I started playing this part, I wouldn’t ever go back to being Frankie Notte. Once I stepped into the play, the only way the curtain fell was with death.
Nikolai got out of the car and I saw him walk toward my door through the tinted glass. My face got hot and I bunched the soft fabric of my coat. I always thought when I died it would be obvious, like the casket funeral type of death, not this ambiguous thing, this Alzheimer’s of the soul where I was not only forced to watch myself die but be an active participant, where I took the dagger and plunged it into the soul of Frankie Notte so I could play the role of princess.
Nikolai opened the door. I exhaled deeply, smiling to keep from crying, and stepped out. Just as I got out of the car, Nikolai grabbed me. With a surprisingly firm grip, he kept me in place. I stared at him, waiting.
What now?
“You must not let him break you,” he whispered against my ear. “Become whatever or whoever is needed, even if it is the antithesis of what you are now. Shed your skin and don another, so long as you survive, and remember this last thing: no matter what you do, no matter what happens, he is the one who set the fire that forced you to rebirth yourself.”
Hours later, I stared at the fire in the library, thinking about what Nikolai had told me.
Talk about a mind fuck.
It was comforting in a way, but I felt Nikolai was saying it more about himself than me. What if I already had been reborn? Sighing, I turned back to my book. A copy of Nautical Knots by some obscure British writer was on my lap with a decoy next to me. I had to master a very complicated knot in less than two days and since I had no access to the internet, this was the way to do it.
“Nautical Knots.” I heard his low, sultry voice before anything else. It snuck inside my blood, vibrating through my veins and body. I didn’t even hear his footfalls or the sound of creaking floorboards. The next second he was by my side, a nearly black lock of hair falling over an intense bluegreen eye. Raising a brow, Beast leaned over and picked up the book I had beside me.
“Don’t even get me started on what I thought that was.” I raised up the decoy book, deflecting. “You really need a system here.” Beast thankfully took the bait, dropping the book on knots I’d been reading and going instead for Shakespeare.
“Romeo and Juliet,” he commented. “My only love sprung from my only hate.” He smiled wryly and my breath hitched, my heartbeat stuttered, before I realized he was quoting the play. I looked at his quirked lips, remembering the verse in my head.
My only love sprung from my only hate
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathèd enemy.
I sighed. It was just more mind tricks. Raising a brow, I took the book back slowly. “I thought none of these belonged to you.” Eyes shrewd, I waited. The copy of Romeo and Juliet I held was worn, beaten, obviously read, and often too. I assumed that was because it had been given to him, though.
As I studied Beast, waiting for him to reply, I’d already come to my own conclusion. Despite whatever he had told me in the beginning, every single book in this library was his. I should have realized it sooner. After all, it was Shakespeare who wrote that the wise man played the fool, and Beast knew the Bard so well he was quoting him to me by memory.
