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CHAPTERONE
A Year Ago
The cold night air cuts right through my thin dress. “Where are we going?” I ask, my voice shaking from both fear and the chilly evening air. Nikolai hadn’t allowed me to get a coat when he’d forced me out of the warmth of the house where we were staying. He’d been manic and wide-eyed at the time, and I thought it best just to go along with him.
That’s what I’d been doing for the last year. Going along. It was the only way to keep Nikolai calm most days. Well, that and sex. But tonight, I had a feeling that it wasn't going to work.
“Don’t ask so many questions,” he ordered, as he dragged me along. I was trembling with fear. When Nikolai and I had first started dating, I had thought that he was the perfect man. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
“Let’s go back into the house,” I begged. I wrapped my arms around me, trying my best to keep warm. “I can make some dinner.” I was doing my best to try and convince Nikolai to give up whatever plan he had, because I was sure that it wasn’t something good.
Nikolai’s hand tightened around my arm, and I did my best not to wince. “We are almost there,” he said.
I gulped. I didn’t know where ‘there’ was. Nikolai had stopped sharing his plans with me when I’d tried to warn his sister Sasha. He’d been distant with me since then, connecting more and more with his mother.
I frowned as I thought about Katarina Petrov. She’d never liked me much. She’d been obsessed with her son well before he’d nearly died fighting the Blanchi’s, but now, she had a terrifying stranglehold on him. Katarina was an awful woman.
“We’re here,” Nikolai said. His voice was gruff as he spoke.
I looked around. We weren’t too far from the house—just inside the tree line. What gave me pause was the ditch we were standing in front of. It wasn’t deep. The earth was too hard for too much digging. And as I looked at it, I felt my heart come to a stop.
I turned to look at Nikolai. His once handsome face, which had always looked at me with soft eyes, was devoid of any sort of emotion. “Nik?” I asked, my voice quivering.
I didn’t get a chance to say much more. His hand raised, a shot was fired, and I was falling into the icy depths of the snow.
* * *
The Present
I woke up with a start, sweat dripping down the back of my neck. Despite the cool breeze coming from my fan, my hair was matted against the back of my neck, and my breath was coming out in short pants.
The sheets were tangled around my legs. Glancing over at my phone, I groaned. It was only 5 AM, and I didn’t technically have to be up until 7. But I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. I never was able to after one of my nightmares.
With a groan, I heaved myself out of bed. My shoulder was throbbing. I pressed my fingers to the scar tissue that had built up over the last year. My wounds had healed. At least, the external ones.
Sighing, I grabbed my robe and made my way to the kitchen. I wasn’t getting any more sleep, so I didn’t see the point in wasting the morning. Walking into the kitchen of my new home, I couldn’t help but shake my head slightly.
My new place, a one-bedroom den, was practically considered grandiose considering what we paid for it. I chuckled slightly, shaking my head as I recalled that I’d once had a room that was bigger than this entire place, and my father’s house was larger than this shitty, rundown building.
It didn’t matter since living that life nearly got me killed and left in a snowy ditch.
“You’re up early,” a voice called out. I nearly dropped the two-day old, used coffee filter I was reusing.
“Jesus, Julia,” I muttered, pressing a hand to my heart. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Julia, my roommate, and the only reason I could afford this place, walked over from the den. She stretched out her long, lithe body and released a big yawn.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?” I asked.
Julia was normally at her boyfriend’s house these days, and if she wasn’t there, she was at the New York City Ballet, where she was a corps member. She was the perfect roommate since she was never home. It kept her from asking questions about why I rarely slept, and why I’d spend my last two cents to keep the lights on all night instead of sleeping in the dark.
“No,” Julia said. “I have class in an hour.”
Now that I could focus, I could see that Julia was fully dressed. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a high bun, a sign of her upcoming work. “Do you want some coffee?” I asked.
Julia wrinkled her nose. “How old are those?” she asked.
“Two days,” I said with a shrug as I popped it back into the secondhand machine, we’d managed to find at a thrift shop.
