My fury was so all-consuming, so visceral, I scared myself with it. I’d stomped to the foyer with a red film covering my eyes, the cool handle of the doorknob on my palm not enough to wake me up to what I was doing. I was half surprised it didn’t melt in my grip.

It was only when the biting midnight breeze whipped through the fabric of my clothes, the hollowness of my bones, that fury gave way to comprehension.

I glanced down at my bare foot and the surface it was pressed to. The stone. Outside the door.

I wanted to move it. Wrench it from the dangerous deadly spot and bring it back to safety. But as more unease and panic snaked up my ankle, I realized that there was no safety inside for me, or any of my limbs.

Only deception.

Lies.

Death?

He’d lied about everything, so maybe now that the truth had been unleashed, that clock, the one counting down my heartbeats, maybe that had stopped.

There was something I didn’t tell Lukyan about my life before. About my life after I broke, well and truly. When Christopher considered my barren womb and shredded soul as a job well done and cast me off to live with it. To wither away and die with it.

Lukyan knew what happened after.

He knew I changed everything about my identity, buried the woman—if that’s really what I was—from before and sequestered myself in a rickety farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. He believed that all happened when I was shown that the world of freedom was just as suffocating as a cage.

I created my own cage.

He knew this.

But what he didn’t know, what I didn’t educate him on, was the fact I didn’t run immediately. Didn’t grasp onto my newfound and bloodstained illusion of freedom and leave it all behind.

No, I went right back to where it all started.

I had to ring the bell. I didn’t have a key.

I didn’t have anything, actually. Just the clothes on my back and the duffel full of money that one of Christopher’s goons had thrust at me while Christopher sat behind his desk, watching me with self-satisfaction bordered with boredom.

“Consider it a severance,” he said, tapping on his keyboard, only half paying attention to his wife.

The mother of the child he’d murdered.

I eyed the letter opener on his desk, a few inches away from his wrist. Sharp. Always sharp. Everything in this house was kept that way. Made to make sure it could cut, wound, kill on command.

My mind wandered to the idea of darting forward—neither of them would expect it—and grasping the weapon in my hands, implanting it in his eyeball and watching the blood pour out. Hear the crushing of his flesh as he struggled.

They’d kill me, obviously. Most likely I’d have a bullet in the back of my head before I watched him die.

That should’ve been motivation enough, the impending death. I craved it. Yet I was too cowardly to seek it out myself.

Just do it, a voice in my mind coaxed. Your daughter needs to be avenged. You owe her that.

But I stayed still. Because I had no other choice. Because as much as I wanted to have Christopher’s blood on my hands, as much as I wanted the cold and satisfying relief of the grave, I didn’t want it to come from them. I wouldn’t let the people who’d controlled my life—if that’s what it was—determine my death.

So I was silent.

“It’s generous,” he continued, barely glancing up. He was comfortable in his position, because he knew I wasn’t a threat. He made me that way. “You could’ve gotten a coffin. Count yourself lucky.”

Lucky.

The word bounced around in my head, shattering pieces of my skull with the force of it.

He glanced up, eyes filling with that detached sadistic affection he had for me and my suffering.

“You’re smart, Elizabeth. Despite your many misgivings. So I know you won’t do anything as stupid as open that mouth. It would, in my eyes, consequently end you in the same position as when you tried to take that extended vacation.”

My hands shook with the mere mention of it, my wrists burning with such intensity that I had to glance down at them to make sure no one had put on steel cuffs when I wasn’t looking.

There was nothing there.

Nothing visible, at least.

The cuffs would always be there.

He smiled and glanced back to his iPad, waving at the man who shoved a bag at me.

I took it out of reflex more than anything else.

Then I was dismissed.

I let myself be. Walked out of the house that I had dreamed of escaping. Without one word. Without an ounce of fight.

And then I stood in the middle of the street, clutching the bag, staring up at the ugly world around me, felt the weight of the crushing buildings falling down on me.

And I walked.

Thirty-six blocks.

It took a long time. My steps were slow, hindered by the shooting pain in my abdomen, from the wounds that remained stitched but somehow still raw and bleeding at the same time.

I fostered a grotesque hope that that pain would always be there, that I’d never heal. That I’d be given one tangible and wretched thing to show that she had been there. That I didn’t dream her up. That she was something.

Some point during my trek, I’d stopped still, in the middle of the sidewalk. Not from pain, but from a rogue but visceral emotion that worked as the equivalent of a brick wall.

It wasn’t sorrow finally hitting me, catching up with me as I hobbled away from the corpse of my previous self.

It was hatred. Pure and blinding hatred for the people around me. The ones smiling into their phones, or laughing with their friends. Pushing strollers. Living.

All of them oblivious.

I had a sudden but real urge to scream at them, to hurt them. Do something to rip a jagged and ugly hole in their normalcy to show them reality. The ugly one. To push them into the abyss where I lived.

I wanted them all hurt with a passion so real that if I had some sort of weapon, I might’ve spilled blood.

But the broken pieces of my soul would only draw my blood, so I found myself walking on.

To my childhood home.

The doors stared at me. Always, doors seemed to stare at me. Taunt me with their ability to take people places. Lock them in. Let them out.

The housekeeper answered.

One I didn’t recognize.

Of course I didn’t recognize her. I’d not set foot in the family home since my wedding day two years ago. My mother would’ve gone through at least twenty maids by that time.

“Yes?” she asked, not an ounce of recognition on her face.

I cleared my throat. It scratched with the motion. “I’m here to—” I cut myself off, not quite sure what to say. My voice was scratchy, raw, my throat unused to forming words.

I hadn’t spoken since I’d left the hospital.

Empty.

We might’ve stood like that for a while, the maid confused, scared most likely, and me mute and useless.

“Vivian, I asked you to clean the floors, not smother a dirty mop over them,” a sharp voice penetrated the awkwardness of the exchange.

The maid jumped at the voice, glancing backward and then back to me.

“Well, by all means, stand with the door open, and do nothing that you’re employed to do.” The voice was closer now, and both Vivian and I were paralyzed by it.

The door opened wider and the maid had no choice but to scoot out of the way to reveal my mother. She hadn’t changed, of course; her plastic surgeon was paid handsomely to make sure of that.

But it wasn’t the Botox that stopped her face from forming any kind of expression at seeing her daughter for the first time since some party a year ago. Or maybe it was longer. Who knew. She would’ve known about me. About everything. That’s what my mother did: collected information, stored it away like ammunition, to offer to my father during wartime. And more importantly, peacetime. More blood was shed under the guise of peace than any other.

I knew that because it was blood shed from my very own veins. My mother knew this. She would’ve designed it to be so, for some reason or another. Some slight increase in their standing.

She’d literally stand on my corpse just to get a little higher on the totem pole.

She already had.

“Elizabeth,” she said, nodding as if I was the wife of someone she didn’t rightly like but had to be polite to nonetheless. I guessed that was what I was. “What are you doing here?” She looked me up and down. “And looking so… disheveled.” Her tone reeked with distaste.

I hadn’t even glanced in a mirror, or any form of reflective surface since I’d left the hospital. I’d barely realized what clothes I’d thrown on that morning. They wouldn’t have matched, because I barely knew how to dress myself. I hadn’t chosen what went on my body—what went inside my body—in two years.

My mother was the cruelest and most definitive mirror known to man. But I’d looked at her enough to know I didn’t live up to standard.

“Disheveled?” I repeated on a whisper that was little more than a croak.

She nodded, folding her arms. “It’s not seemly. Not beholden of your image, or ours, for that matter.” Her gaze went behind me, most likely looking for security detail, or guard detail. On the extremely rare occasions I did leave the house without Christopher, I had them following me.

There was no one now. And I felt naked. Raw.

“You’re alone?” She froze. “You didn’t…” That was the first time I’d heard my mother fail to complete a sentence.

I realized with her shock that she hadn’t heard. She almost certainly knew about my baby. She’d known I was pregnant. Even sent a card.

Best Wishes.

But her eyes barely glanced at my flat and empty stomach. She was more concerned with the fact that I was disheveled.

“He killed my baby,” I said. It amazed me how dead my voice sounded. How it lacked to invoke emotion in me that I was sure I had to have. Needed to have.

She flinched, the tiniest amount before she resettled her mask. “You miscarried. It happens.”

That should’ve hurt. The woman who birthed me, her utter brutal coldness toward what I’d lost. But it didn’t. Nothing could hurt me now.

I was dead.

You couldn’t hurt a dead thing.

“Yes,” I said. “It does happen when someone beats the shit out of a woman who’s eight months pregnant.”

She pursed her lips.

The sounds of the street behind us intensified in the ensuing silence.

“Why are you here?” she asked, like the words previous were of little consequence.

Then again, they were of little consequence to her.

I was of little consequence now that I’d lost my usefulness.

“Because I have nowhere else to go,” I whispered.

She inspected me, nothing in her eyes, not even a sliver of affection, of worry, of anything that would betray the fact that she was my mother. My blood.

“I suggest you find somewhere else.”

Then she closed the door in my face. I stood there, on the steps of my childhood home, numb. Glanced up at the beautiful brick, the high windows, the fortress I’d grown up in.

Not my home, I realized. Just another cage.

I was going to go from one cage to another because I didn’t know anything else. And my mother was right, I would find somewhere else. And it would be another cage, because I wasn’t strong enough for anything else.

I stood in the middle of the foyer, feeling quite the same numbness as I did that day on the steps of my family’s dwelling. At some point during my memory, I’d snatched my foot back and slammed the door.

I stared at those doors, and for once they didn’t stare back at me. They were just doors. Wood. Inanimate. Functional.

They would open into the world. They wouldn’t kill me. They were offering me something in the face of the truth.

I was staring at them because I couldn’t decide if they were offering me freedom or just another cage. I was staring at them because I couldn’t decide which was the one I was standing in right now.

And then I stopped standing.

I walked.

Into freedom or further into my cage.

I figured they were the same. It was just a matter of perception.

* * *

Four Days Later

All my life, I considered myself a little dead inside. Something in my blood, something not quite right, something that grew bigger, colder with every piece of horror or pain I experienced.

By the time I lost my baby, I was dead.

But even then, I had never felt as much of a zombie as I had the past four days, a ghost haunting the rooms of this house, terrified I’d see the man who made me this way. A depraved, wretched part of me wanted more.

Because I was depraved and wretched, and I’d always have the dead piece inside me. And with him, that didn’t feel like such a burden. Like such a fucking disfigurement.

I locked myself in my room for the first two days. Obviously he’d observed this, or at least Vera had, because three times a day, there was a quiet knock and then a rattling of a tray. I’d open the door to an empty hall and a plate of food and drink at my feet.

I’d stare at it, glare at it, toy with the idea of going on a hunger strike, just to spite him. But then I’d snatch it. Because I’d let him screw with—destroy—enough of my body. He wouldn’t starve me too.

I wanted to sleep. Sink into the bed and never wake up. But my brain wouldn’t let me. Sleep was a gift for the unburdened.

So I worked. Tirelessly. On every project I had currently and all future projects.

For the year.

I read four books. Gruesome. Gory. Enough to give a regular person grizzly nightmares.

But I wasn’t a regular person, and grizzly nightmares were my reality.

After two days, I couldn’t stand breathing the same air any longer. I longed for whatever meager freedom was offered.

So I tentatively left. Regained the routine I’d adopted when I’d first crawled from that bed.

Woke up.

Did my yoga.

Showered.

Clothed.

Breakfast.

Work.

Wandering.

Reading.

I added to it. I began to experiment, to actively work against the bars of my cage. Little things. I’d open windows, make myself sit and breathe the air for at least an hour. Then I’d force my head out the window, make myself look, make myself feel the outdoor air encircling my body. I’d time myself. The first attempt, I lasted three minutes forty-four seconds.

I was up to eighteen minutes four seconds.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. Some small hope that I might not be trapped in here forever.

It was inevitable that I’d encounter him.

I knew this.

I’d been waiting for it.

Craving it.

And I found the moment where a lot of our meetings had commenced. The dining room. It was dinner of the fourth day.

And he was sitting there.

But unlike all the rest of the times, he didn’t glance up at me and then back to his food. His eyes found mine the second I entered the room and they didn’t leave.

I knew this because I felt them, every step, every breath. But this time, I was the one to glance away, feign disinterest.

It cost me everything.

But I did it.

I got so far as to sit, put my napkin on my knees and get through half of the meal. It was like chewing and swallowing tinfoil. Every moment was pain.

But I could handle pain.

Lukyan taught me how.

But there was only so much my newfound tolerance could handle.

The knife and fork clattered onto my plate.

“I hate you,” I whispered, certainty and venom mixing to create marble out of my tone as I glared at him across the table.

He stared back. “Good,” he replied. “There’s purity in hate. A chance it in.”

“For what?” I demanded.

His gaze was even. Unyielding. “A chance that you still love me,” he said. “Because if you didn’t hate me, didn’t have rage boiling your blood and dilation in your pupils suggesting intense emotional fury, then I wouldn’t have a chance. And maybe, if it was truly over, I’d likely be dead. At your hands.”

I gaped at him, unable to grasp the concepts he was throwing at me and the cold certainty in which he was doing so. “I wouldn’t kill you for betraying me,” I spat. “I’m not in the business of murder.” Even as the words left my mouth I could taste the lie in them. Had I not progressed—or regressed, depending on your point of view—to the business of murder?

He inspected my pause. “I’m the one who encouraged you to abandon your humanity,” he said. “Therefore, I’m the one who’s going to face the brunt of the absence in the face of my sins.”

I laughed. “You don’t believe in God, so therefore you can’t believe in sin.”

“I believe in you,” he countered. “Therefore, any action to willfully harm you without due intent is a sin. The ultimate sin.”

I glared at him, hatred burning hot through my blood. Fury chased it because that hatred was still ruled by my hideous and wretched love for him. “You believe in me?” I asked. “Well I believe in fucking nothing, so I guess that puts us right back where we started, Lukyan. Nowhere.”

My chair squeaked backward, the sound gritty against the air. I threw my napkin on the table as I stood, like a bad actress in a worse Hollywood movie. Then I turned on my heel and walked out, slamming the door behind me.

I hated him. So much. Wanted to run a million miles to escape from this.

So I ended up hating myself more. Because the only place I had to run to was the room I’d woken up in what felt like a lifetime ago.

Because I couldn’t go anywhere else.

My broken mind didn’t give me the strength to walk out that door, even when that world outside couldn’t possibly crush me more than Lukyan just did.

But then, when I least expected it, the outside world came rushing into that room.

And it punched me in the face.

* * *

Lukyan

He hadn’t been able to ingest a single item of food that entire meal. Hell, he’d barely been able to stomach anything the past four days. Mostly he’d just sat in his command room, watching her. Watching her every move, letting everything else fall away but her.

It wasn’t healthy.

It wasn’t logical.

He was overwhelmed with his capacity of feeling toward her words. Toward their last meeting. The things she said. The utter pain and betrayal in her beautiful eyes.

It was worse than any of the death he’d witnessed in countless eyes in the decades of his business.

She was going to be the death of him. That much was true. He knew it to his bone. He had always determined he’d leave this earth on his own terms.

But now he was certain it would be on hers.

He despised every second of the past four days. His skin was uncomfortable, unbearable on top of his flesh. His original plan was to wait patiently for her to recover enough to come to him. To let her make the first move. So he could regain the power.

But then, on the fourth day, he lost his patience.

His control.

His power.

And he didn’t give a fuck.

When she’d breezed through the dining room with nothing but a dismissive glance at him, it was a shard of glass through his chest cavity.

He expected her to crack. To fall apart and yell. Scream. At least look him in the fucking eye.

She did none of those things.

For fourteen minutes and eight seconds, all he heard was the sound of her utensils, the sound of her deafening silence. He was moments away from tossing his glass against the wall—losing his precious control—just to get something from her when she spoke.

When she declared her utter and real hatred for him.

And it was a relief.

Because there was something in hatred.

He could work with hatred.

After she’d stormed off, taking most of his sense with him, he’d sat silently at the table, thinking about what to do next. How to plan for the best outcome.

The best outcome being her in his bed, his dick inside her cunt and her riding him until they both forgot everything else. His fingers closed around his glass so tight with his need for her that it smashed. Small parts of glass embedded themselves in his palm and he plucked them out without wincing, watching the blood trickle down his hands.

He ached to draw hers again, smear it all over her milky skin when he fucked her. It was the thing he was about to do when his phone dinged.

Instantly, he was alert and the firearm taped underneath his table was in his hand as he strode over to the china cupboard. He pushed at the cabinet to reveal a modest arsenal. He had one for every room in the house.

Prepared for every eventuality.

And the ding on his phone told him some things.

That his father had betrayed him.

It wasn’t a surprise.

It was somewhat of a surprise that he’d been able to circumvent all Lukyan’s security in order to gain access to the grounds.

The ding on his phone was an alert that the last barrier to his home had been breached. Ordinarily, he’d get alerts with different sounds to say when someone turned off the side road that his driveway forked onto. Another when someone made it to the gate. So on and so forth.

But he’d had none of those.

So the sound on his phone gave him only precisely enough time to retrieve his firearms and watch three armed men approach the glass doors forking off his dining room.

No time to get to Elizabeth. To warn her.

Because there was likely to be more than those three. And they were likely to be tasked with finding Elizabeth. Either killing her or taking her to his father.

To Ana.

And Ana would rip her skin from her body just to spice up her evening. Ice crawled up his spine, unfamiliar in life-or-death situations.

Elizabeth would fight. He had trained her well. If they encountered her before he could dispatch the men walking casually toward the glass doors, she would do what needed to be done to survive.

He watched the men approach with cold calculation. They meant to kill him. And they outnumbered him. Neither of these things particularly worried him. He’d been stalking death for some time now. Since the beginning, most likely. That thing broken inside him, that had been born broken, it required it. A grim fascination with death. It promoted his way of life. And he was fascinated with his own demise more than any of the others he’d personally orchestrated.

He hadn’t put particular thought into his end. He’d known it would be bloody. Violent. That was the way of it. But he didn’t think it would be in the form of a small, broken, damaged and unhinged woman.

He thought he was the teacher of death, as well as the bringer of it. You brought about enough endings, you became somewhat an expert in the field.

But he’d known nothing.

She’d showed him death wasn’t a bullet to the head, the snapping of precise bones in the neck, the nick of the right artery. No, it was so much more painful and ugly than that.

It was fucking love. Or whatever warped version of the emotion he shared with her. That was the death he’d been stalking, and he hadn’t even realized it. If he had, he would’ve put a bullet in his own skull before all this had come to pass. But he didn’t. He was the living dead because of her, and he hated her as much as he loved her. But these men, they would not give him whatever kind of end that was left. Fuck no. He wasn’t scared of that final death. But he was terrified at what would come after his lights went out.

Of her death.

That would not happen.

Be it at his hands or God’s. That was the only way she was leaving this hunk of rock. And he’d be right behind her.