“Y-yes. Please, stay. Don’t leave me.”
I push a lock of hair behind her ear. “Never, sweetheart.”
Later,when I wake up with my wife in my arms upstairs, the sky is still dark. My phone vibrates on my nightstand, and I turn to pick it up. It’s Maksim—at five in the morning, no less.
My pulse hikes, my impatience running thin. I look at a sleeping Cecilia, gently repositioning her so I can get up without waking her. Then, after I leave the bedroom door open, like every night since I found her up on that window frame, my finger hovers above that green icon on my screen as I make my way to the office a few rooms down.
I tap it before I even get inside.
“Took you fucking long enough,” I snap.
“My apologies, but I think you’ll be glad I took my time. What I found out wasn’t meant to be discovered—the woman sure knows how to cover her tracks.”
My ears perk up. I open my laptop, a file waiting for me in my email. I flip through the pages, my eyes racing through the lines even though it’s hard to absorb anything at this speed. But there’s rage there, flickering behind every shift of my pupils, a rage that builds and builds like a ball of fire. My sweet wife is suffering, and the bits and pieces of what I’m seeing here are enough to make me want to set the fucking world on fire.
“This is everything?” I mutter, gripping the phone tight at my ear.
“Yeah. Start from the beginning. It gets crazier with every page.”
45
Cecilia
Someone has poured sand into my mouth. I try to swallow to bring some moisture back, but it doesn’t bring the relief I was seeking. As I try to arch my head, my limbs, I realize I’m paralyzed. Awake but sleeping, a weight heavy on my chest.
A dream.
One of those you can’t escape until it’s over.
Hands grip me, carrying me somewhere out of my childhood bedroom. I see the walls of thepalazzo, the darkness crawling with shadows everywhere. And these hands...I want to know who they belong to, but every time I look down, they disappear.
Here I am again, in my mother’s bedroom—that cursed white bedroom bathed in crimson blood. I’m now standing by her bedside, the knife limp in my trembling hands. It seems to have appeared out of nowhere. My eyes shift across the room, expecting to see the shadowed silhouette coming at me from the corner.
It always does. Except right now, a disembodied voice speaks from somewhere behind me instead.
“You did this to her,” it says—a woman’s voice.
“W-what?” I whisper.
I shake my head, tears running down my face. I don’t understand. I was sleeping, and now I’m here, this knife in my hands…
“You killed her. So when your father comes, you apologize, lest he send you away to live with strangers. Do you understand?”
No. No, I don’t.
Hands grip my shoulders from behind, sharp nails digging into my skin. A familiar perfume reaches me, mixed with the metallic tang of my mother’s blood.
When I turn to face the person, a prickling sensation takes over my fingertips. I move them a little, and the dream tilts like a ship sinking in the ocean, disappearing under the water.
My eyes burst open. I’m awake.
I get up on my forearms, looking for my husband, my heart threatening to break out of my ribcage. When I see he’s not here, I push the sheets off me and hurry into the hallway.
“Mikhail!” I cry out. “Mikhail! Where are you?”
I step deeper into the hallway when a door slams open, loud and forceful. My husband rushes out like a demon summoned from the depths of hell. Merciless. Ready to kill.
“Sweetheart. What’s wrong? What happened?”
