He ushers me away, and we go inside the house first.
It’s beautifully decorated with a look of an old world meeting the modern, but nothing is coming to me. We head upstairs and look around the rooms before then we go back downstairs doing the same thing.
Other than feeling like I should kick my shoes off, light up the fireplace, and relax in front of it with a steaming mug of something hot, I feel nothing more than that sensation of familiarity.
Desmier opens the back door, and we go outside, heading toward the lake.
When I look toward the wood, something catches my attention and I stop. It’s two twisted-looking oak trees standing opposite each other. Thick vines wrap around the branches, which grow high and wide like they’re reaching for the sky.
I turn, and so does Desmier.
“What is it?” he asks.
“There.” I point. “There’s something about those trees.”
I’m walking toward them before he answers. He follows, falling in step with me.
The closer I get, the stranger I feel. No longer feeling that sense of familiarity, but something else.
As I get closer, something pierces through my mind along with the flash of… An image?
I close my eyes briefly and see a face. It’s the terrified face of a woman. The
image is there for a breath and gone the next.
When I open my eyes and my brain processes the face, I realize it’s Vittoria Butyrskaya.
My God…
“Something happened here.” My voice comes out in a hurried rasp.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I keep following the path, walking through the thicket of trees. The path continues, ending at a little shed ahead.
The sight jolts my brain. I stop again as a burst of memory pushes into my mind, forcing me to remember, and it’s like I’ve stepped through the veil covering my eyes. I can see and hear, as if someone injected me into the action scene of a film.
The thud of heavy boots echoes on the ground along with the ferocious voices of men. Then Vittoria and Pavel run through the woods with terror marring their faces in the moonlight.
A tall, lanky guy runs next to Pavel, and Vittoria is carrying a little girl.
Little girl?
No…
That’s me.
It’s me she’s carrying. She is my real mother.
And the guy next to us is my brother, Elmier.
We rush through the dark, formidable woods. Branches breaking beneath our feet as the men chase us.
Pavel—Father—raises his gun and shoots behind us, but the men keep coming. There were so many of them.
I see us running past the barn and going deeper into the woods, where the oaks turn to giant sequoias, looking like sentinels. But the men catch up with us, and more come.