Erik was a monster.
She was an accomplice, willing to be sold and knocked up as a broodmare.
Family?
I had no understanding of that concept anymore. I was alone, forever alone with the lurking threat of a marriage I didn’t want, the warning that I would be forced into being with a man who’d rape me, sell me, or share me.
Despite the earnestly serious expression on her face, I wouldn’t believe her lies.
I didn’t have a family in any traditional sense of that word.
The pigeons were more my kin than anyone else. They taunted me, soaring freely through the world in such a way I could only ever hopelessly dream of.
Not shackled. No expectations to prepare for. No orders to submit and obey.
Family?
A raw laugh bubbled up my throat. If I were dragged back to sleep, to that druggy nothingness that the medicine forced me into, I would’ve broken into a hysterical mess of giggles.
Family? Are you kidding me?
All I’d had were Erik and Yusef. Monsters.
With the most depressing hint of defeat, I closed my eyes and waited for the tears to come. They’d fall at the threat of going back to the hell I’d dared to escape.
My cheeks remained dry. No sobs broke my steady, sleepy breaths.
I was too numb, safe in that locked up compartment in my mind as I tried to shy away from the horrors of life and trauma again.
I’m still not free.
I never will be.
7
ALEXSEI
Raisa left the room with me. She was shaken, distraught with how wildly Kalina had reacted when she woke up.
Wrapping my arm around her shoulders, I steered her down the hall. In my free hand, I checked my phone for a reply from Ivan.
Alexsei:Get here NOW
Alexsei:Raisa needs you.
That message alone would always have him come running. But knowing that he was in a meeting with Emil and a couple of supervisors near Brooklyn, I doubted he’d have reception in the specific warehouse he was at.
He’d been worried about his wife being stressed about Kalina being missing.
Now, though, she was enduring a worse fate of more stress and anxiety. It couldn’t have been easy for her to witness her cousin lashing out like that.
“It’s expected that she’d be scared,” I said as gently as I could.
She heaved in a deep sigh, walking further with me since Kalina had fallen back asleep. Due to how severely she’d panicked, though, I asked for the nurse to monitor her with a guard as backup in the room. No one needed to be injured.
“Is it?” Raisa glanced up at me. “What kind of life was she stuck in to bethatscared?”
I shrugged as a way to hedge telling her what I really thought. Simon and I were still piecing together what we could about where she might have been.
