This isn’t a nightmare. This is real. And I’m chained in Lucien’s house with a girl who looks like Natalya but isn’t the Nat I knew. Not even close.
I try to calm down for a moment, taking the situation in, trying to force my mind to decide whether it’s a dream or not, since my head is still a little messy.
Then I force myself to look back at Nat, she plays with her hair, stroking one huge bleached strand, not minding me.
She’s even skinnier than before. She was skinny, given the figure skating she’d done her whole life, but now she looks almost sick-skinny.
“Nat,” I whisper, but she’s so focused on her hair that she’s not giving me any attention.
“Nat!” I try to speak louder but my tongue is scraping my upper palate in my mouth, sticking to it.
She finally looks at me, with that eerie smile, looking like a broken doll.
“Where is Kasien?” I try to formulate the words the best I can.
She stares at me, looking confused, her smile gone, her eyes empty, looking right through me.
“Kasien, where is he!” My voice is starting to come back as my mouth finally produces some saliva.
She furrows her eyebrows like I just said something inappropriate.
“Who?”
What the fuck? She lost it. This is not Nat.
“Your brother, Kasien. Where is he!”
Natalya blinks once. Slow.
“Brother?” she echoes softly, like she’s trying to understand a foreign word. Her brows knit together, confusion twisting her face into something almost childlike, but wrong and empty.
“I don’t—” she starts, but the sentence dies somewhere in her throat.
Oh god. Something is really wrong.
I swallow hard. “Okay, Nat. Adrien, then. Adrien. Do you remember Adrien?”
The reaction is instant. Her spine goes rigid. Her pupils blow wide. Her hands freeze mid-air, fingers curled into her hair like claws, like she’s about to rip the hair out.
“No.” The word is tiny, but sharp. “No.”
“Nat, he’s alive, he’s—”
Fuck, I hope he is. The memory just jumps in my head. He was shot, he was bleeding out.
“NO.” The scream rips out of her so violently I flinch back against the headboard.
It’s not fear, or anger, but it’s primal. Like a survival instinct firing off inside her skull. I freeze, breath caught in my throat.
“Natalya,” I whisper, “what’s wrong? What did they—”
“STOP!” Her hands fly to her ears, palms pressed hard against her head, shaking.
She starts pacing around the room, small at first, then faster. Her breath stutters, catches, breaks. It looks like she’s trying to push the name out of her mind physically, like it hurts to think it. My own panic spikes.
“Nat, please. I’m not trying to hurt you, I just—”
She lets out a high, raw shriek. She screams.
