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“We’re going back to where it all started. Back to the place we first met,” I say. “Your parents' apartment.”
I hop into the car and wait until he’s in the driver’s seat.
“This is dangerous,” he grumbles in a low tone.
I shrug. “Only my father knows about that place. No one will look for us there.”
Despite his reservations, Beast sits down and fastens his seat belt. “I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“No,” I reply with courage, just like he taught me. If he can see beauty in me, I want him to see the beauty in him, too. “But not knowing who you are is no way to live either. So let’s go.”
CHAPTER15
Beast
Seeingthe building where I was born makes my feet feel glued to the ground.
I can only look up at one spot; the window on the fifth floor. It’s blocked off with shoddy wood that looks half-rotten. Old.
“Are you ready?” Aurora’s voice is like a bullet hitting me in the dark, immediately drawing my attention. Rain pitter-patters down onto her head. “Let’s go inside.”
She clutches my hand, weaving her three fingers through mine. Slowly, she pulls me along with her, into the building, into the place where my nightmares began.
She leads me inside and up the staircase. But the higher we go, the more my entire body begins to sweat.
It’s as if I’m walking right back into my past, my memories coming to life.
My hands clutch the banister, but it feels cold to the touch, and when I lift it, I swear there’s a droplet of blood.
“Are you okay?” Aurora asks.
When I look again, the blood is gone.
As if it never even existed.
Am I hallucinating?
I nod at Aurora even though it’s a lie, but I don’t want her to worry.
I’ve never been anything but strong, and I refuse to stop now.
“Which number was it?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at all the doors in the hallway.
I point at the one on the far end. “That one.”
She grabs my hand and walks with me to the door. “C’mon. We can do this.”
She opens it up. It’s still unlocked, covered in police tape. But there’s no sign of life inside the apartment.
Every piece of furniture is still there—upturned, thrown aside, broken down—left exactly the way the police found it. As if suspended in time.
No one has been here since that night. Not one soul dared to purchase the property, probably assuming it’s haunted by the memory of the violence that took place there.
I push away the restlessness building in my muscles and step into the rubble of what was once my life before my parents died. Before I became an orphan, forced to survive out on the streets, eating nothing but scraps until I was picked up by snatchers and taken into a strict training facility. All so I could be made into the perfect weapon. A killing machine. A man known only as Beast.
What was left of the boy I was before doesn’t exist anymore. Every trace of him has been erased off the face of this earth.
I push open a door and see a bloodied mark on the floor near the bed.
