At ten years old, Synek knew better than to be afraid of the dark—it was what hid inside it that had his heart beating painfully fast inside his chest.

There was no window for him to turn his gaze to with moonlight spilling through the glass, nor was there any crack at the bottom of the door providing any illumination inside the dark crawl space he laid in.

There was just cloaking darkness … and the monsters within it.

The monsters didn’t come every night, though that didn’t stop his mind from working overtime and wondering whether this night would be the one when the old wooden door creaked open and the shadows made his chest feel heavy. No matter how he tried to imagine a pattern, something that might alert him when his fears were brought to life, he couldn’t predict it.

He was so tired now, having spent the day at school, then up for several hours to complete his lessons before it was time for dinner, then bed. The only thing he wanted was to close his eyes for a few minutes, to bask in the silence around him, but fear kept him awake.

Even as his eyes felt heavy and tears threatened to fall from keeping them open for so long.

It didn’t matter how tired his body was; his mind kept him from drifting off.

He couldn’t be sure what time it was, whether midnight had come and gone, or if the next day had yet to pass.

Surely, a few minutes would be enough. Surely, he would be fine once he closed his eyes and stopped letting the shadows scare him.

Yes, that was exactly what he needed.

Then he could stay up and wait the night out until the sun rose again and his day could begin. Besides, he didn’t mind sleeping at his desk during the lunch hour. He would catch up on it then.

Decision made, Synek finally let his eyelids fall shut, holding the threadbare red blanket he slept with in both of his tiny fists as he exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

Tonight, they weren’t coming.

A second passed, maybe more, before he heard it—the sound that made his eyes pop open as fear slithered down his spine. He tried to clamp a hand over his mouth and force his cry back down to a place where even he couldn’t hear it. Screaming would only make it worse.

His breaths left him in giant gusts as the door creaked open with deliberate slowness, and perfectly manicured fingers wrapped around the edge of the wood.

His monster wasn’t grotesque with talons and scaled flesh as the many stories spoke of. His monster was beautiful like freshly fallen snow and just as cold and unforgiving.

His monster was as human as he was.

As he tried to remember how to breathe, he watched as his monster crept closer, her white teeth gleaming in the darkness of the room.

Just as the first tear spilled onto the pillow beneath his head, he watched her lift the belt she carried, squeezing his eyes shut as she began to swing.

“Repent,” she whispered before the leather struck flesh.

* * *

Fucking hell.

Synek jerked out of the memory with a start, his chest and back coated with sweat. Too long had passed since his nightmares had plagued him. Or rather, the sort that brought on actual fear when he woke up instead of anger.

Usually, his mind offered him a steady supply of other memories, featuring the people he had killed in the name of others. Faces he might not have thought about while he was awake but haunted him in his dreams when he was most vulnerable.

It was nightmares that usually kept him from sleeping most nights. He much preferred skipping it entirely and driving himself harder and harder until he practically passed out. Thankfully, his unwanted dreams were kept to a minimum when that happened.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen nearly enough.

Instead, he’d taken to drinking his dreams away until nothing remained but an empty space where his nightmares were supposed to be.

But maybe he should have laid off the fucking vodka last night because sleep or not, he felt like fucking shit.

Awareness slowly crept in as Synek stumbled to his feet, his eyes slowly blinking open as he took in his surroundings … surroundings that were all too familiar.

The night’s events came rushing back.

Getting off the plane and heading over to the Hall.

Drinking his liver away with a nice bottle of vodka.

Knives and dart boards.

A beautiful face in a sea of ordinary ones.

Iris.

She’d smiled at him, laughed, ground herself against his cock when he had her against the wall in the alley next to the Hall.

She’d played him.

And worse, he hadn’t seen it coming.

It was a rookie mistake to fall for this sort of bait, but for once, he hadn’t been thinking about the Wraiths or the Den or his job or any of the rest of the shit he did day to day. He’d been grounded at the moment with her.

A fucking fool he was.

She had even been there when they brought him in, though he hadn’t expected her.

When he’d woken up chained to the wall, fucking Wraiths all around him cheering and taunting, he hadn’t expected to find her hidden in the back.

She might have looked like them, dressed as she was with the multitude of piercings in her ears, but seeing her then, he understood why she hadn’t roused his suspicions—she wasn’t a Wraith.

It went beyond what they wore—it was a state of mind.

Where the hell had Fisher dug her up?

The sound of clicking heels brought his gaze up from the floor and to the woman now walking toward him. Seeing her earlier, he’d expected to find dark hair and a cunning smile that used to tempt him into anything she wanted, but instead, he found silvery strands and cold eyes.

His brow furrowed as he gazed at a face he hadn’t seen in years before tonight—a face that made his blood turn cold.

“Glad to see you’re awake again, puppy. I thought I’d lost you.”

Just hearing her voice …

It made his skin crawl.

But he didn’t let the feeling reflect on his face—that was what she wanted. Weakness was what she got off on most.

He needed to focus on something else. “Who was she?”

They both knew who he meant, and as he’d thought—just as it had earlier—the fact that he seemed less concerned about her and more interested in Iris annoyed her. Her vanity couldn’t take it.

“She’s one of many. Clever, don’t you think, considering you’re here now? Then again, I had the plan all laid out for her.”

For the first time since he’d laid eyes on her, Synek gave her his undivided attention, his gaze sweeping the length of her from head to toe and back again. “Would say it’s good to see you, but…” He shrugged. “It ain’t. And don’t call me fucking puppy.”

It was a name he’d always despised, despite her love of it. A part of him was sure she used it just because she knew how much it pissed him off and wanted to get a rise out of him.

Her smile faltered when he spoke, but that didn’t stop her from coming toward him. Up close, he could now see why he hadn’t immediately recognized her in the other room, even if her voice was the same. Her once black hair was bleached and dyed gray, her dark eyes covered by gray contacts—though those hadn’t been in earlier—and the once proud tan she’d always sported was gone.

Over the years, she hadn’t just aged, she’d become an entirely new person.

A person he recognized even if the thought made his stomach lurch.

Rosalie touched his face, running her nails along his jaw. “Tell me you’ve missed me, and I won’t let them hurt you. I promise.”

No, he didn’t believe that. Hurting him was half her fun. “What’s this, eh? You think you can turn yourself into Winter, and that’ll make me, what? Want you?”

That, for whatever reason, made her smile grow. “I can be whatever, or whoever, you want me to be. Give me those three little words, and I’ll make this easy on you. You can come back, and all will be right again.”

“I’ve never been a liar, Rosalie, and I’ve never been afraid of a little torture.”

She stared at him, her expression crumpling with each second that passed, and just as her anger spread across her features, she slapped him, snapping his face to the side, the sharp sting almost making him laugh.

Rosalie had always been good at that.

“Ah, let’s be honest here,” he said, holding her gaze. “You don’t miss me, do you? You missed beating the shit out of me, then me getting you off, isn’t that right?”

That only served to piss her off further, and this time, instead of a slap, she punched him hard enough that he tasted blood in his mouth. But even as she struck him, she didn’t deny what he said, and before she turned to give him her back, he saw a spark of excitement in her eyes.

Yeah, she would make this hurt.

“I gave you everything, puppy, and you spit in my face. How could you?”

They remembered his time with the Wraiths very differently, but this was her family—her blood. She thought the psychotic shit he’d had to do for them was nothing to be concerned about.

She thrived, just as he once had, on the chaos of it all.

She didn’t care about the bodies buried out in the fields or others burned until nothing was left of them but ash.

Rosalie hadn’t thought twice about the women she’d brought to him for what she liked to call “gifts,” even knowing he didn’t like to fuck women who didn’t freely offer it.

Worse, she’d never cared about his resentment toward her for the things he’d done to please her.

Synek blew out a breath. “How long d’you think you can keep this up, eh? A day? A week? These chains will only hold so long.”

“You’ll stay in this room until you learn to heel like the dog you are. However long that takes… well, that’s up to you, puppy.”

Synek’s gaze flickered over to the three men now entering the room—all brawn and no brain. They didn’t know the subtle art of torture. They were here to beat the shit out of him until every breath he took would be painful.

Taking a breath now, he straightened, then blew it back out. Slowly, as he conjured memories of the past, the world around him started to fade.

He counted back from ten, listing the many addresses where he’d lived during happier days in his shit-filled life.

“What’s he doing?” one of them asked, the question filtering in through the mental guards he was putting up.

Rosalie laughed softly. “He’s disassociating, so he won’t have to mentally endure what we’re about to do to him. They say the mind is the first thing to go when pain is involved.”

The man scoffed. “Explains why he’s so fucked in the head.”

“It is, indeed,” Rosalie replied, her voice sounding closer. “But I always liked him that way.”

She kissed the corner of his mouth, brushing her fingers through his hair.

But he felt it in some distant part of his mind. Soon, he wouldn’t feel anything at all.

For one moment, all he saw was gleaming metal winking in the corner of his vision before he disappeared from that room.

* * *

Whispers in the wind kept Synek from sleeping as he laid in a pile of filth next to the overfilled trash can outside Piccadilly’s restaurant, but without a blanket or even a thick enough coat, he’d much rather have the filth than nothing at all.

It was his fifth night out here in the unforgiving winter—his fifth night alone and hungry and desperate for something to eat.

But without any money, there would be no warm stew to fill his stomach or a soft bed to lay his head. He could have ventured into one of the shelters that littered the city, but after his first night there and one too many hands finding their way onto his person, Synek couldn’t bring himself to stay.

So instead, he’d walked until his feet ached and found a place where he wouldn’t be bothered until the early hours of the morning.

He might have been shivering, his toes frozen in the well-worn trainers on his feet, but this was better than what he’d been used to. Anything was better than that.

Synek had only just closed his eyes, willing his body to stop shaking long enough to doze off, when he heard the rustle of feet crunching on the icy sidewalk.

He couldn’t be sure, now or later, why he’d opened his eyes and leaned far enough out of his hiding spot to see who lurked at the mouth of the alley. It wasn’t as if he liked people very much, or the recoil they often got once they caught sight of him.

But he was alone, in the dead of winter, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to just disappear into the shadows.

Synek wanted to be seen.

He couldn’t see much at first, just the vague impression of a man as wide as he was tall and someone else walking alongside him. A girl, he realized, when he saw dark hair fluttering in the wind behind her.

Until she stepped underneath the streetlight, he couldn’t make out any of her features, but once she was there, he could better see her face. Her eyes were wide and heavily lashed, her lips a shade under plump.

But pretty, Synek thought as he looked at her. She was pretty.

In his desire to get a better look at her, he knocked over a glass bottle, the ensuing sound making him cringe as he rushed to pick it up and taper off the noise. But it was too late, he already had her attention.

Instead of shying away, she peered through the darkness, searching for the source until she laid eyes on him. Surprisingly, her eyes widened in delight.

The man she was with—her father, he presumed—didn’t bat a lash as she started down the alley toward him, too engrossed in the conversation he was having on his mobile.

“Don’t be scared,” the girl said as she neared, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He found it odd that she would assume she would be the one to hurt him rather than the other way around. He was the one living in the grubby alley, after all. He was a boy, and she was a girl, and he knew, far too well how to hurt someone if he needed to.

His time on the streets might have been short, but he’d learned to act quickly.

And one thing he’d learned in all his time here was that sometimes, it didn’t matter if he posed a threat or not—most reacted as if he did.

“Daddy, look!” the girl exclaimed, pointing a finger at him even as she looked back at her father.

“We don’t take home strays,” the man said, barely sparing Synek a glance.

Not that he minded.

“But it’s cold!” the girl said with a stomp of her foot, clearly not used to being denied something she wanted.

Synek didn’t understand why it mattered to her so much. He was nothing, no one, yet there she stood, going back and forth with her father about the dirty throwaway boy sleeping in the trash.

“I’ll make sure he’s not any trouble,” the girl said, trying again. “He’ll be good, I promise.”

The man let out a long-suffering sigh, one that spoke of past arguments won by the girl across from him. “First sign of trouble and his ass is out.”

The girl smiled brightly at him before crossing the short distance where Synek was still sitting. “Come on,” she said in a soft voice as if she were talking to a wounded animal. “I’ll make sure you get food and water.”

A part of him screamed that he should stay where he was and decline her offer, but instead, the allure of a warm bed and hot food had him stumbling to his feet.

The girl smiled wider as she patted the top of his head. “We’re going to have so much fun.”

Synek couldn’t muster a smile.