1
SASHA
For a moment, I can’t move. I can’t register what’s actually happening or reconcile it in my head.
I’ve heard gunshots before. Of course, I have. Most of them have terrified me. Some, like the one I heard when Viktor put a bullet through the head of the man who violated me, have made me feelgood. Relieved. Happy, even.
There’s nothing good about this sound.
Part of me thinks I’m hallucinating it. That I’ve finally, completely lost my mind. That it broke when Max walked out of the library, a ring in his pocket for another woman.
Max.
I don’t know how long I sat on the floor, crying, but I know that by now, he’s in the ballroom at the other end of the house. Maybe he’s asked her to marry him already. Adriana, the beautiful brunette who can never be a threat to his vows because he doesn’t want her. He doesn’t love her.
Not like he wants and loves me.
Maybe he hasn’t had a chance yet. But one thing I’m sure of, as I sit there shaking, is that the gunshot came fromthere.
If I sit very still, if I don’t move, maybe none of this will be real. Maybe it’s all a nightmare, and I’ll wake up.
I’ve thought that many times before. A coping mechanism, my therapist calls it. I’d thought it when rough hands held me down over shipping crates, tearing at my clothes, when flesh that I didn’t want touching mine invaded me anyway. I’d thought it when I felt the bite of leather cracking over my thighs again and again, tearing at my flesh, welting it, making me hurt and burn and bleed.
I’d thought it when I held two crying children in a cold upstairs bedroom, waiting to find out if the men who’d come to save me–us–would succeed in doing so.
Max was one of those men. And even though I know that, if that gunshot was meant for him, there’s probably nothing I can do to save him, even though I know that I’m nothing against the kind of evil men who are after him and me, I find myself struggling to my feet anyway.
I feel wrung out, drained, after crying so hard and for so long. My chest feels empty, as if my heart has dissolved and leaked out of me drops at a time. I feel numb as I walk unsteadily towards the door of the library, unsure of what I’ll find outside of it, like emerging from a bubble back into the world.
When I step out into the hall, I hear screams. Shouts. Cries.
Another gunshot, more screams. I feel myself shrink back, pressing myself against the hard wood of the wall, my heart racing with a fear that I’d almost managed to make myself forget.
Max wouldn’t want you to go that way. He’d want you to run. Escape. Save yourself.
I could go to my right, and flee towards the front door. I don’t know to where, exactly, but I’d be going in the opposite direction of the violence. I know it’s what he’d tell me to do.
But I can’t leave him.
Men in black suits with guns drawn go rushing down the hall toward the ballroom. They don’t see or notice me, pale and thin in the shadows, shuddering back away from the sounds that I know all too well.
One foot in front of the other, I follow them.
The first thing I smell, at the doorway to the ballroom, is blood.
I know the scent, sharp and metallic, the way it sticks to the back of your throat and never completely leaves. Once you smell it, hot and freshly spilled, you know the scent of it forever. Once you’ve seen it, you can never completely get the sight out of your head.
When I think of spilled blood, I think of Max’s hands reaching for me, and the knowledge that I was safe. That he had stepped between me and what was coming for me and ensured that it would never, never touch me again.
I’d thought I was safe after that. I’d thought Alexei was the last terror I’d have to face.
I’d been so very, very wrong.
I see him first, as I hover there.
He’s standing in the middle of the dance floor, a ring of people around him, some collapsed, others holding each other, others standing there in shock. The room itself is in shambles–buffet tables overturned, broken glass and china everywhere, tables and chairs scattered and broken. And in the center of it all, in front of Max, is a body.
A red dress. Brunette hair. A hand outflung, blood leaking out from beneath, only slightly darker than the dress, as if it’s not blood at all, just the fabric melting outwards over the wood. And there, glittering on the dark wood next to her fingers, a blood-spattered diamond ring.