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In the end, Alexander is right. I don’t have a choice. I never have.
I lower my head and nod slowly.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “I always knew you’d come around.”
9
CORA
I stumble out of Alexander’s office on numb legs and move in a stupor down the hallway. As I pass by the front door, I pause. Just a moment. A half-step of hesitation.
Then I keep going.
There is no escape. Even if the opportunity arises and I can run through an unlocked door or slip through an open window, they have me by the throat.
They have Jorden.
So I duck my head and keep moving, plodding the well-worn path up the stairs to the second door on the right.
When I open the door, I see that my bedroom looks exactly the same as it did the day I left. Every book in its place on the little white shelf in the corner. Every necklace hanging from golden hooks on the wall. Every fuzzy, flower-shaped pillow on my bed.
It’s all the exact fucking same.
Like none of the years in between ever happened.
Tears well in my eyes, and for the first time all day, I can’t stop them. I press the door closed quietly and lean my forehead against the wood. Tears roll freely down my cheeks, though I choke down the sobs so they can’t hear me fall apart.
It’s not as if I’ve spent the last three years missing this room. Every second that I was forced to live in this house, the only thing I imagined was getting away.
But seeing it perfectly untouched—like they always knew I’d be coming right back—is just a little too much for me to process right now. The future has never looked so bleak.
I take a few deep breaths and let the tears stop on their own. I’d hate to get all cried out so early in this nightmare. I’m sure horrors aplenty await me.
I run a hand down the lime green paint on the walls, smiling sadly at Teenage Me’s design aesthetic. My mom hated it.
“Alexander has an interior decorator,” she argued when she saw the gallon of neon paint I came home with. “Let Jennette design your room. That way, it will match the rest of the house.”
That was the problem: I didn’twantthis room to match the rest of the house. In here, I wanted to feel like I was a million miles away. Like I was in my own world. One where Alexander McAllister didn’t exist. And when I couldn’t pretend I lived somewhere else, I poured my feelings into journal after journal.
I drop down on my knees in front of the bookshelf. Tucked behind a row ofBabysitter’s Clubbooks are three tattered diaries. I gingerly pull one out and flip open the cover.
The first entry doesn’t have a date or a greeting. It’s just chicken scratch penmanship blurred in places by little drops of water. I must’ve been crying when I wrote it.
I have no clue who would choose to live in this hell. My mom is brainwashed and no one seems to see what is happening to me. Alexander is making me break up with Trent because his family isn’t nice enough. His dad is a dentist! His mom works at our school. I don’t even know what that means. “Nice enough?” Before Mom met Alexander, we weren’t “nice enough,” either. We were living on the streets. Mom and I ate at soup kitchens. Does Alexander know that? Maybe I should tell him. Maybe then he’d kick us out. I’d rather eat garbage than spend one more night around his fancy dining room table.
When I close my eyes and focus, I can see Trent’s face. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy on the lacrosse team. He had acne and a scruffy goatee, but I thought he looked like a Calvin Klein model. I was in love.
When I asked my mom if I could meet Trent at the movies, Alexander took one look at Trent’s last name and shook his head.
“You aren’t going anywhere with him.”
I turned to my mom for backup, but she wouldn’t look at me. Sometimes, I knew she disagreed with my stepdad, but she was too scared to say anything.
I flip through the journal, reading entry after entry of me pouring my heart out on paper. There were moments of levity. Brief glimpses of the life I managed to eke out for myself amidst Tsar Alexander’s tyranny. But mostly, I prayed for a good man. One who was bigger and stronger than Alexander and would take me away.
“You’re wasting your ink,” I mumble to my past self.
The only reason I got out of this mess the first time is because I left all on my own. No man ever showed up to whisk me into the sunset.
