Finally, my voice works. “Eli, I’m perfectly safe at the orphanage, and you are my friend. I thought?—”
“I don’t want to be just friends. You will be mine,” he snaps at me, fire spitting out of his hands with his temper. I jump back. “Don’t be scared of me. I’d never hurt you. I want you as my pet. To be beside me. To be mine. It might take some years, but?—”
“Years!” I shout. “No! I’m not staying in here for years!” I run for the trapdoor, but it disappears before my eyes. I step back. “What kind of magic is that?”
“My father taught me it.” He smiles at me, and I realize I have been trapped. He knows it too.
“Eli, I’m not a pet. You know that, right? I’m a human.” I try to keep my voice even. “You can’t just lock me in here and assume that I’m going to be okay.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I am your master. Maybe after a few months, it’ll be different, and you’ll fall in love with me, and everything will be fine.” He is insane. How did I not see it before?
“Eli,” I plead. “Don’t leave me in here.” He’s already walking away. I go to grab him, and his arm flings out, his strength throwing me across the floor, and I slam into the cabinets.
His eyes widen as he looks back as I wipe the blood from my mouth and struggle to stand up. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Just stay here. It’ll be fine. I’ll bring food back in a few days.”
I can’t stop him as he walks to the door, and he leaves me. The door itself disappears behind him, leaving plain walls. There’s nothing in here. I spend hours looking for a way to escape, finding nothing. Two months, I’m locked in that room. Two months until my life ended up in flames.
I flash back to reality to find Blackfire yanking me upstairs by my upper arm. He pushes me into the bedroom.
“Don’t you dare,” I scream. “Don’t you lock me in here. I’ll never forgive you for it! Don’t!”
He’s already shutting the door on me, just like Eli did. I start panicking, my breaths coming out in pants as I hear him lock it. I look towards the window, rushing over, but he has locked that too, and I slam my arms on it, but the glass doesn’t break. I pick up the side cabinet and throw it at the glass, and it just bounces off onto the floor. No. No. No. My breaths are shallow as I pant,and I can’t think as I collapse to the floor. “Let me out. Please, please let me out.”
Tannith sits with me in the darkness and fear that swallows me whole. “It’s okay. You’re not with Eli, and that fucker is gone. They will let you out.”
I don’t hear her as I start to spiral into a panic, as I curl up into a ball on the floor, and I don’t move as I cry.
Chapter Twenty
I’m back there again. Sometimes I see this place in my nightmares, in my weakest moments in my life, and I feel like I’m stuck. He will always haunt me, and there is nowhere in my mind that I can escape him. He didn’t just destroy my body; he destroyed my spirit and left a part of me haunted by him forever. I know it’s a nightmare, because I fell asleep on the floor, curled up in a ball, screaming to the wolves that have trapped me to let me out. They didn’t listen, and I don’t know why I expected them to listen to me.
Everything is such a mess, and I keep making it worse. My stupid, weak heart is making me feel things for some of the wolves, and I don’t know how to make it stop. Apparently, my mind came up with a solution—show me a nightmare of the worst moment of my life. This is why my mind is broken.
I open my eyes to find myself back here in the empty prison of a room that Eli locked me in. The dirty red rug on the ground, the crumbling walls and the cobwebs on everything I haven’t touched. I know my life has been shitty since I was eight, but I have never wanted to give up on it, not until now. I’ve resigned myself to the fact I’m going to die; I just have to make sure it happens before Eli can take anything else from me.
It’s freezing cold at all times of the day, and my breath is pure smoke as I shiver on the floor. The scraps of food that he brings me once every three days are not helping the hunger pains.
I ran out of food and fresh drinking water two days ago, and he hasn’t come back. It’s been six days since I’ve seen him. That’s longer than he’s ever left me, and I wonder if he’s going to leave me to die in here now. I’m certainly not nice to him when he comes. I scream with all the fight I have left. I throw my fists at him, and he dodges me so easily. Eventually I beg him to let me out, while he stands there with a stupid smile on his face, looking at me and telling me he loves me. Eli doesn’t know what that word means. I am certain of it.
I might never have been in love with anybody before, but I’ve read enough books that I’ve snuck from every library in the human district to suspect that love is not this. You don’t hurt someone that you love, not on purpose. You don’t trap them and trick them.
I love Tannith, my sister in everything but blood, and I won’t see her again. She won’t even know I didn’t run away and leave her for Eli. She must be so worried about me and scared Eli has put the slave mark on my forehead and taken me to his home. I wish I could see her just once more and tell her she was right, and I was so, so wrong about Eli.
I jerk up to my feet when the door appears right on the wall, the fizz of flames alerting me. Eli walks in, running his handsthrough his red hair, with a wild look in his eyes that I’ve not seen before. He slams the door shut behind him, and for once, the door doesn’t actually disappear like he always makes sure of. He’s made a mistake. I just have to distract him long enough to get out. I rush to the other side of the room and quickly begin my plan to escape.
“Come here and hug me, Merry.” Eli opens his arms. Such a fool. “Don’t run from me. Look.” He pauses and lowers his arms when the dipshit realizes I’m not going to run into his arms and happily embrace him. I quickly notice there’s no food with him, no bags, nothing, and my heart races. Has he come to kill me this time? “You don’t understand everything that is happening, and it’s okay. I will tell my father, and then we can have a future. I was right about you, and he will see it.” I shake my head. “I’m sorry I took so long this time,” he gently coaxes, like I’m a scared sheep. “My father and my cousin…they’re ganging up on me. They’re going to send me away because they say I’m out of control, but I’m not,” he snaps angrily, and I flinch. “I’m sorry, I’m not angry at you, just at them. They are self-righteous and arrogant, like they haven’t killed before.”
“Who did you kill?” I whisper.
He shrugs. “My fiancée. She wasn’t you.” He steps closer. “She wouldn’t understand you, and she wouldn’t let me keep you. I had to make sure she was gone.”
He’s in my face in a second, his hands clenching my shoulders tightly. Too tight and I whimper. I’ve lost so much weight, and I thought that starving in the orphanage was bad when we didn’t get food for two days. Now my bones are sticking out, and everything hurts. Six days of no food was all the time I needed to drop into madness. There is nothing like being fed scraps of food every three days—that wouldn’t even keep a cat alive—to twist reality.
I don’t think he’s even aware of how much food I need, but one slice of bread and a few chunks of cheese really don’t last that long. I swear it’s just food he slides off the table to bring here for me from whatever posh, ridiculous house that he lives in. I still don’t know anything about him. He still doesn’t tell me things, but I don’t care. I just have to get out. That is it. I’m done with starving to death, and I’m choosing myself.
I slam my hands into his chest. He doesn’t move, not that I thought he would, but I make sure he hears me. “Eli, you realize I hate you, right? I thought you were my friend that day when you came to help me with the logs. I thought there was something like humanity in you, but you’ve shown me that wolves don’t have humanity. You don’t have feelings. You don’t have anything other than this need to claim and possess humans like we’re just toys to you. I will never be yours. I will spend every day of my life trying to escape you and leave you because I do not want you.” I make sure he sees it in my eyes. “I will never want you.”
Fire explodes out of him and wraps around me. At first, I’m too shocked to process what he has done, but then I scream. I collapse to the floor as his fire rips across my stomach, across the tops of my thighs, burning away my clothes. I scream and scream as the fire licks down my arms, across my breasts, across my back. I roll in flames and I beg him to stop for what feels like hours, but it must be seconds, but he doesn’t. His laughter echoes in the air as the smell of flesh burning hits my senses.
