1
ANA
For a minute, I think I dreamed it all.Every insane, fucked-up, miserable, happy second of it.
Alexei. The Paris apartment. Alexandre. The study. The bedroom.Hisbedroom.
His dining table. Liam.Liam.Liam’s hands, Liam’s—cock. Yvette, holding a gun to my head.
The test that I’d failed. Oh god, I’d failed it so completely.
Alexandre, calling out for me. Me, calling out for him. And Liam, putting a bullet in his knee. His shoulder. Other parts of his body that I hadn’t seen.
Is he dead?
It feels like a dream in parts, a nightmare in others. I don’t know what to make of it, so I keep my eyes squeezed tightly shut because I’m not sure if I want it all to be a dream or not. If I want for none of it to have happened.
And if none of it did, what bed am I in? Where am I? Am I in my tiny apartment back in New York, the one I rented after Sofia “moved in” with Luca, and the gorgeous pre-war apartment we’d lived in together was no longer being paid for? God knows I couldn’t have kept it up on a ballerina’s stipend, so there was no choice but to move somewhere else. Luca had helped me out a bit, feeling guilty for what Franco had done to me, but I’d had to move.
I hadn’t loved that apartment. I hadn’t done anything with it. It had been four walls and a bed, and I’d moldered away there, wallowing in my sadness and depression and self-pity, hoping I’d die and not having the nerve to end it myself. Ignoring everything I was supposed to do in order to get better.
It was nothing like the Paris apartment either, full of sunshine and art and books, plants and the scents of the city wafting in through the windows, coffee, bread, and lemon cleaning solution.
But was that real?
Was any of it real?
I’d hallucinated the music box—or had I? Was that a hallucination within a hallucination?
Am I going fucking insane?
I open my eyes slowly. My mouth feels dry, I’m guessing from whatever was used to drug me, if it was all real. I remember that part—or I think I do—squirming in Liam’s arms and screaming, trying to get free, his frustration before he’d finally done something to make it possible to get me out of the apartment. I can’t exactly fault him if it was real, though I want to. I’d done everything I could to get free, to get to Alexandre.
Why? Why had I wanted to stay with him so badly? Why does my heart feel like it’s breaking at the thought that I’ve lost him?
He’d given me away.Testedme, according to him, but the former is what it feels like, somewhere deep in my shattered heart. He’d said he wanted to protect me, his pretty broken doll, and then he hadn’t. He’d given me to Liam, telling me that if I really loved him, Alexandre, I wouldn’t get any pleasure from it.
But that wasn’tfair.
I’d wanted Liam, from the moment I’d set eyes on him, the way you want something that you know is unattainable. A designer pair of shoes you’ll never be able to afford, a dress that you know would never look good on your body type, a meal so expensive you could never justify going out to eat it, a bottle of champagne you tell yourself you’ll buy one day when you deserve it. When I’d met Liam, I’d known from the jump that I could never deserve him. Even that one afternoon in the garden, I’d known it was all a fantasy. That I was having a conversation with someone who would ultimately go back to his life and think of me softly with pity, from time to time. Not someone who would want me back. Not someone who would love me, come after me.Save me?
I hadn’t even really thought I deserved Alexandre, though he’s closer to what I would think I might deserve. He was broken too, like me. He’d been hurt, destroyed, had his soul ripped into so many pieces that he wasn’t sure he even remembered who he was, twisted into something so different from the man that he’d once been that only the very core of him was left.
That resonated with me, because I feel that way too.
ButLiam.
The head of the Irish Kings. Handsome and powerful, the heir to something bigger than I can imagine. No, I couldn’t be with a man like that.
But if I’m to believe everything I remember, Liam came tosaveme.Me. He left everything he was responsible for in Boston and came halfway across the world to snatch me out of Alexandre’s arms and bring me—where?
Where am I?
When I open my eyes, I’m in a bed. A crisp white bed, very different from the one I’d woken up in in the Paris apartment, but it brings back that memory, sharp and clear. Waking up dry-mouthed and groggy, just like now, looking around and not recognizing my surroundings, just like now. Wondering what was a dream and what was real. So many of my days have been like that, to the point that I no longer entirely trust my own mind. I feel like I’m floating, grasping at memories to make anything feel more concrete, and I hate it. I want to feel solid again, real.
Alexandre made me feel real, just for a little while. And at the same time—not.
His doll. His pretty, broken doll.