Everyone with agoraphobia is afraid. Of course, that’s a gross simplification of a complex mental condition, but at the crux of this crippling condition is fear, despite whatever clinical term it’s packaged into. Fear so crippling it becomes a separate entity from those within whom it originated. It’s a being that looms upon you, guards the door to the outside world, standing there confronting you, daring you to push it aside to regain a sense of normalcy.

I was only generalizing from personal experience and from lurking on message boards, but people equally hated and felt comforted by that burly being of fear. Because it stopped them from going anywhere. Doing anything. Outside, that was the great Big Bad. And it was a fear of people, interacting with them, letting them see us, really see us and having to act normal in front of them that terrified a lot of people.

I knew more of these stories by heart. I knew every detail these people shared, right down to what kind of cereal they ate. But they didn’t know me. I was even a ghost online.

But what I’d gleaned was that people seemed to be everyone’s greatest fear. I had no problem with people. I’d interact with my delivery men, albeit strangely, but I was a strange person. I’d always been a strange person. Broken people were always strange. There wasn’t any chance of being anything resembling normal after you’ve been shattered.

I didn’t fear people, not even the family who turned me over to Christopher. Not even Christopher himself, not anymore. There was nothing left to fear from them since they’d gone through the laundry list of atrocities, checked them off, and anything more from them would be something I’d already experienced. There was no fear in something you’d already experienced, come to know. That’s the whole basis of fear—the unknown.

So I wasn’t afraid of people. I feared myself. Having to see myself, really know myself. And then finding out that I didn’t like what I got to know. And then I’d be stuck in my own skin, like I was stuck in the house. I feared going out into the world and having to exist and be someone and function. Having to act like my very skin wasn’t a cage I couldn’t escape.

But I wasn’t out in the world. As Lukyan told me on my first lucid day here, I was nowhere. I was no one. But being here, with him, in this tomb, I was slowly being faced with my fear.

And it wasn’t Lukyan or what he’d do to me.

It was me.

It was standing in the mirror like I had yesterday and seeing all that ugliness that I hadn’t let myself see. What I’d been too cowardly to inspect. Those broken pieces cutting my insides and outsides.

He was doing that, I had no doubt about it. He was learning all the grotesque and horrible things about me without even knowing my favorite television show or snack food.

I had only learned his name yesterday. I wanted to know more. Craved to know more. Just like I craved more of the pain that came from being in his presence. Because it was different, more visceral, more alive than what I’d been living with alone.

I was retracing the steps I took yesterday before I knew it. Though this time he wasn’t waiting for me at the french doors. I didn’t look at them too hard because the weight of their stare, their taunt, was almost as suffocating as that of the foyer. I passed through that quickly too. My mind was everywhere and nowhere as I entered the room of perpetual night, of perpetual death, perpetual Lukyan.

And he was there. Not in the first room, but in the real one that lay beyond it. The door was ajar, and the stark light crept into the amber light of the night room. Hesitation and fear and about a thousand different emotions flowed through me, but my craving for him trumped them.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the chair in the center of the room when I was last in here, for obvious reasons. A chair was the only ordinary thing in this room, the only unremarkable object. It didn’t warrant a glance.

That was until Lukyan was seated in it.

Cradling a crystal tumbler filled with clear liquid.

Vodka. Rocks. Slice of lime. Interesting, I would’ve picked him for a scotch man.

Of course, I didn’t know him at all.

If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it. His eyes went over me with disinterest. A distracted sort of calculation.

It hurt. A lot.

But I liked it, the pain, so I moved farther into the room of beauty, intent on presenting him with my ugliness. He watched my approach.

I didn’t get too close to him. Not as close as I wanted. Nor was I as far away as I wanted either.

My palms were sticky against the cool and hard air.

“I killed my daughter,” I said flatly. The statement, the first time it was said aloud, ricocheted through the air like a bullet, ripping through me and settling there, inside me, painfully.

He didn’t react, not even a swift inhale.

“I killed her by staying, the moment I found out I was pregnant,” I said. “My husband…” I didn’t need to explain anything about Christopher to Lukyan of all people; he was the one who’d hired Lukyan to kill me in the first place. I swallowed glass and forced myself to continue. “I knew what he was like. I knew.” Regret and shame pulsed through me with such power that it almost gave me the ability to wade through time, to change that decision, to change my life.

Almost.

“I planned on leaving, told myself it had to be perfect so he’d never find me, and I waited. I killed her with that waiting.”

It was the cold hard truth that I’d refused to admit until I said it aloud. Until I laid it, my heart, pulsating, bare, hot on the table for him to frame amongst his collection.

“It didn’t matter that it was his fists, his kicks, his violence that made her die inside me. Because it was inevitable. And I was the reason it came into actuality. She never took a breath in the outside world.”

The clean and cool oxygen floating through my lungs turned to poison, taunting me.

“Never, not once, did she get to inhale outside me,” I whispered. “Because of my actions. My lack of action,” I corrected. “My cowardice.” I finally steeled myself to meet the eyes I’d been avoiding. “So why should I have that, Lukyan? Why should I inhale and exhale and live in the outside world that I took from her with my fear and weakness?”

Of course, I didn’t expect comfort from him. The very presence of the house itself, this room, it repelled any kind of comfort. I imagined his body to feel exactly like the statue I so often likened him to. Cold. Sharp. Lifeless.

I didn’t want comfort. What I needed was pain, the sharpness and iciness of it was what was keeping me upright, keeping me more alive than I had been since the moment I found out my daughter would never breathe clean air.

I expected silence from Lukyan, so of course he gave me the opposite. And he did not look at me. Instead he looked upon that black bird—my bird, as I’d come to think of it.

“The moment a bird was dead, no matter how beautiful it had been in life, the pleasure of possession became blunted for me,” he said, his voice strangely rhythmic.

He sipped at his drink—drained it, in fact—before setting it down on the white table beside him that melted into the walls with its identical color.

“Not me, of course. John James Audubon. He was a nineteenth-century ornithologist.” He stood, not stalking toward me as I had expected. No, he went to one of his frames. “Great man, but I’ll have to disagree with him,” he said, standing in front of the frame. “Death only makes things more beautiful.” He stared through the glass, as if the bird inside were alive, in flight, staring back at him.

They were all magnificent in their own way, and this was no exception. Its head was onyx, as was its tail, the torso a beautiful blend of stark white and vibrant yellow. It was the stupefying feathers that came from its head that were most amazing. They were thin, like long draping ears, spanning at least twice the body length of the creature. Like a cape split in two.

“The King of Saxony bird of paradise,” Lukyan said. “Scientific name, alberti. Both that and the common name were given to honor the then king of Saxony, Albert.”

His eyes didn’t move from the frame, yet somehow I figured that he was staring at me. Not the me in front of him but the pieces I’d thrown at him, hurled out of my body when I spoke.

“Only males have ornamental head plumes such as this.” He nodded toward the frame. “Quite remarkable.”

It was only then that he looked at me. Both of me. The me who was held together by skin and bone and the other me who he could crunch under his feet if he so desired.

“There are a lot of remarkable things in this world, Elizabeth,” he rasped, his voice straying from the cool monotone I had become used to. That I had come to despise. “A lot of them beautiful.” He glanced around the room. “Rare. And only able to be possessed in their death.” He looked to me again. “The rarest of all the remarkable things are the ugliest and most broken of things. They can only be possessed in death too.”

He ghosted toward me so the fabric of his jacket brushed against my side. His expanse towered over me, yanked me into a terrifying stratosphere, one I didn’t want to stay in but one I’d never willingly leave either.

He leaned down so his lips almost brushed mine. “But there’s more than one version of a corpse. Some can be stuffed and preserved and put into frames. Others can walk, talk and breathe.”

His fingers trailed my windpipe before his palm settled on my neck, squeezing. Instantly, my air supply was cut off. This wasn’t a caress. Pain exploded from his pressure, and black dots danced in my eyes.

“Which one are you going to be, Elizabeth?” he asked conversationally as my oxygen supply was cut off.

My fingers went to his hands, with the purpose of yanking at his grip, fighting. But when they settled on the skin I’d been so sure would be as ice-cold as his stare, they stopped. It was smooth. Warm. Comforting. I sank my nails into his skin, scoring at the flesh. Not to fight, but to see the blood blossom and flow warmly onto my fingertips.

He didn’t even flinch at the pain. Nor did he break eye contact with me. “Which one do I want you to be?” he whispered, almost to himself.

We stayed like that, suspended in the moment of mutual pain as my nails sank deeper and his hands squeezed tighter. The most chaotic of moments for most every person on the planet—in the midst of strangulation—were the only seconds I’d found peace since… since forever, I guessed.

Peace wasn’t a luxury of the tortured. And he gave it to me then, the only way he knew how. With violence. With death.

And then he let me go, though not violently. Slowly. Tenderly. His fingers brushing at what I assumed was the bruising already showing under my skin. I sucked in the air roughly, with pain and satisfaction that he’d stopped and equal parts disappointment that he didn’t keep going.

I expected him to walk away. Stride off and leave all the feelings I was quite possibly imagining here with the dead things.

I should’ve known better to think Lukyan would act in any kind of way that I would expect.

Instead of turning his back to me and leaving, his hands grasped each side of my neck once more. But this time he used his grip to yank me to him roughly and land his lips on mine. To attack the mouth that was still scrambling for air. White-hot heat flowed into my cells, into my bones as his tongue moved against mine, as his hands moved from my neck to tangle in my hair, yank at it, almost ripping it from my scalp.

There wasn’t much I could do to survive the sheer ferocity of the kiss except surrender to it. To Lukyan. I did that readily. Greedily. I matched his violence with my own, sinking my teeth into his bottom lip and groaning when hot coppery blood mingled in our mouths.

If him strangling me before was peace, then this was the sweetest and most toxic chaos.

And I wanted more. Needed more.

Like he sensed it, Lukyan gave me exactly what I didn’t want. He let me go suddenly, the absence of his touch more violent than anything that had come before.

He was three paces away from me when I regained full motor control. And then he was smoke, dissipating from the room while I recovered from being brought back from death and then slammed back into the grave once more.

All from one kiss.

Was a kiss that brought me back to life exactly what I needed?

Or was it taking me further away from the death I’d been so sure I craved?

I stiffly walked over to the frame, my fingertips grazing the glass. The chill from the hard surface entered my veins.

“King of Saxony,” I whispered, for no reason.

I was trapped in the house with a man who had meant to kill me. Might very well still mean to kill me. But not by locked doors, force, or ropes or chains. Not physical ones, at least. The man who very well might kill me gave me the impression that he wanted nothing more than for me to walk out that door.

I was not his captive.

I was my own.

I could very well die here. If there was anything left worth killing.

If there was anything left in me that wanted to live.

He collected dead things, after all. With every day that passed, I found myself wanting to stay, even if that meant I was part of his collection.

Especially if I was part of his collection.

* * *

Lukyan

The kiss was a mistake.

He’d known that the second it began.

It was a huge mistake.

But Lukyan had no power in the moment. He had nothing but the animal inside him demanding her lips. To taste the sorrow on her tongue. To toy with the death they’d introduced into the room. To let the pain he’d just inflicted mingle with the pleasure that had almost knocked him to the ground.

Lukyan didn’t do desire.

He fucked.

Out of necessity more than any real need. Death was an integral part of life, as was fucking. The need for procreation, a lot of people said. But for Lukyan, it was just another form of control. To be able to inflict pain was in the same vein as being able to create and control pleasure.

With her, there was no control.

Only pleasure. Desire. Pain. Fury. Everything he’d been certain, comfortably certain, he had conquered.

He tapped his finger against the keyboard of his computer, watching her wander off toward her room, face inscrutable. She absently grazed her fingers against her lips now and again.

Had she liked it too? The kiss? What came before?

Had it sent her to the edge of the abyss and yanked her right back?

Lukyan was furious with himself for wanting to know. For caring about it. Women’s pleasure was always secondary, if not inconsequential to him.

Now it was almost as important as her pain.

He continued to watch the screen.

But her pain was the most important of it all. She needed it to survive.

They both did.

He would’ve watched her for the whole night if not for the vibration of his phone against his wooden desk. Shit, he would’ve likely gone downstairs and fucked her into unconsciousness if not for that phone call. And that thought made him hesitate. Only slightly, but slightly was enough. He never hesitated. Especially not when his phone rang. When a contract was coming in.

His fingers closed around the cold metal and he put it to his ear, saying nothing. He never greeted phone calls, no matter the fact that he operated off a satellite network that bounced off thousands of towers all over the world and made him untraceable. Feeling invincible was a mistake. That’s how most people got destroyed.

He didn’t let anything destroy him.

He wouldn’t.

The voice on the other end of the line spoke.

Lukyan listened for a handful of seconds before hanging up the phone without speaking. He tapped the keyboard and chartered himself a jet to leave in precisely forty-five minutes.

The call was a confirmation about a contract he’d been working on for months. High profile. An asshole with enough power and money to think he was invincible.

Which was why Lukyan was going to destroy him.

That and the two-million-dollar paycheck.

But that was secondary.

The killing was the real payoff.

* * *

Elizabeth

One Week Later

It had been a week.

I had been alone in the house for a week.

Logically, thinking I was alone just because I hadn’t seen Lukyan didn’t mean he wasn’t here, somewhere. But I wasn’t working on logic. I was working on the way the air seemed lighter, easier to inhale, the way my shoulders didn’t prickle with the telltale sign of someone watching me from somewhere.

He had gone.

And despite being used to surviving on my own, despite needing to be shut alone in a house to survive, I felt an immeasurable amount of loneliness. Which again did not make sense. Because I’d had no warmth from Lukyan, no tenderness. The opposite, in fact. There was nothing that romantic books and movies demonstrated as the groundwork for some kind of connection, for some kind of love.

No happiness, laughter, smiles, warmth in the chest cavity.

There was pain, misery, violence, stifling sense of menace.

Yet I’d never felt so alone than knowing Lukyan wasn’t around.

I wasn’t even technically alone. I’d discovered this two days prior, wandering into the dining room earlier than usual because sleep was a long-forgotten acquaintance at this point.

She was very obviously not expecting me because when I shouted out a hello that could’ve been construed as slightly too loud and maybe even a little aggressive—hey, I was strange—she let out a small squeak and almost dropped the tray she was placing on the dining room table. Instead of falling to the floor, it hit the surface with a clatter, sending a sugar bowl toppling over.

White crystal granules spread across the black tablecloth.

I rushed forward, intending on helping her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

The older and sharply featured woman looked up upon my approach. She swept up the sugar in a graceful move that looked like something someone would do at a magic show.

“No, it is I who should apologize. I was not expecting…”

“Me?” I finished helpfully for her.

I didn’t blame her. Of course she knew she was preparing more breakfast than just the one she had previously, so she knew Lukyan had a houseguest. And my laundry always seemed to be magically taken away while I was reading in the library or stretching in my yoga studio, so she had most likely known Lukyan’s guest was a woman.

She’d also most likely met Lukyan. Seen him in all his cold magnificence. So she was most likely expecting a lithe Amazonian woman of Eastern European descent with painful and unique beauty wearing designer clothes.

She was not likely expecting a rather short and petite, bony, brown-haired American who wore pain awkwardly and seeped sorrow and weakness from her pores. No designer clothes to be seen, just the simple black jeans I was coming to like, despite how much they showed, and a flowing black tee—long-sleeved, of course.

She shook her head, a kindness coming from her face that didn’t suit her rather cruel-looking features.

“No, it’s just you normally don’t come for breakfast this early. Not that that’s a problem. Oh, not at all,” she said quickly.

I smiled, or at least attempted to. I hadn’t done so in years, so I feared my lips were rather grotesque and lopsided, like a stroke victim.

“I’m Elizabeth,” I offered freely.

Mostly because this woman, with her neatly pressed gray blouse and matching slacks and severe bun, deeply lined face and kind eyes somehow reminded me of Agna, of that half-remembered kindness.

She paused, still cradling the sugar she’d swept up. “Vera,” she said finally, after likely deciding her employer wouldn’t kill her for exchanging names with his captive.

His contract.

His complication.

I opened my mouth to say more, maybe to probe her, despite the strangled feeling in my stomach from being in another room with someone other than Lukyan. Someone who may very well be kind. Human.

That was more terrifying than being in a room with a murderer. With a monster. I knew what to expect from monsters. Humans were another story. Their kindness could hurt more than any kind of physical or emotional torture.

But I needn’t have worried, because she gave me a brisk nod and a half smile. “Enjoy your breakfast, Elizabeth.”

And then she left the room on light feet, as most staff of hit men probably mastered within days of their employ.

You had to act like a ghost around murderers; otherwise, they’d realize you were alive and vulnerable. I’d learned that from my mother. From my father. From my husband. Not that it had helped.

“Please,” I coughed, blood spattering onto the white carpet. It had to be color treated almost every week.

Christopher told the cleaner it was red wine and I was clumsy. The cleaner pretended to believe him.

Christopher’s classically handsome face came at me like a bullet, or perhaps that was my rattled and pounding brain unable to properly process speeds.

My scalp screamed as he yanked my head backward. I did not. I knew screaming only made things worse. Only made him more excited. Only made it last longer.

“Please what, Lizzie?” he asked. “You’re my wife. You’re mine. You were given to me. I own you. You know this. You know there’s no escape, only death.”

I coughed again, or tried to, but the angle of my neck meant I only choked on the blood trying to escape my body. My desperation, my fear paralyzed me. Though not my fear for my own well-being.

“I’m pregnant,” I croaked.

His grip did not loosen, though his face turned pensive. “You’re lying,” he decided.

I only stared at him.

He saw something in my eyes. He saw a lot of things most likely. Pain, sorrow, defeat, weakness. But he also saw the truth, because the pressure at my head released and he let me fall to the ground.

I was resigned to lying there, sinking into the fabric of the carpet until I had enough strength to push myself up, to crawl to the bathroom. Instead, gentle hands grasped my bruised forearms. It was surprise that had my body limp and malleable, so he could gently place me on the sofa.

Christopher pushed my matted hair from my eyes. “I’ll need to see a doctor’s confirmation, of course,” he said. Then he did something more terrifying than anything else he’d done that night. He smiled. “If you’re correct, you better hope you’re giving me a son. For both your sakes.” His eyes went to my still-flat belly. Then he stood up, smoothed his suit, and left the room.

I blinked against his words. Then I threw up.

I cradled my stomach in my hands.

“I’ll protect you,” I promised.

Of course, that was a lie.

I couldn’t protect anything.

Not even my unborn child.