It’s an easy question with a straight answer, but the question of what they will do to me spirals into terrifying scenarios in my mind. The best they could do is kill me, and the worst is unimaginable—because I have never seen or heard about the worst things that could happen to a person. I know there are horrors that can drive a human to beg for death, and I don’t want to experience those.
I shut my eyes tight.
Dad will find me.
But what if he can’t reach here before bad things happen to me?
The sound of a door opening wrenches my eyes open. Light pours in from outside. A tall man stands silhouetted in the doorway, the light behind him too bright for my eyes to make out his face.
“Come.”
His voice is accented. He turns away. I can’t place the accent from a single word. I’m grasping for every detail, anything to make sense of this.
I get off the mattress and follow him, barefoot, into a long corridor. There are many rooms on both sides of it.
I can’t process more; the cold is blocking all my senses. I’m barely managing to keep myself walking, shaking and trembling forward. The cold of the floor steals all feeling from my soles. My fingers and toes are blue. I’m on the verge of blacking out.
He climbs the stairs. I manage two steps before I lose the battle with the cold. It seizes control from my brain, and I fall. A sharp pain rips through my muscles before everything goes blank.
Chapter 2
Elowen
Water pouring over me makes me wake up.I sit up straight, gasping for air.Some water enters my nose. I sneeze and glare at the man who just did this to me as I wipe the water away from my face.
What’s in front of me—and what happened before I lost consciousness—slams into my head all at once, making me dizzy. I was in a dark room. Someone opened the door. I fell down the stairs. My tailbone aches from the fall as I sit on the floor. And a man with stormy gray eyes is sitting in front of me on a wooden chair, wearing a black shirt, blackpants, and black gloves. Not a single patch of his skin, apart from his neck and face, is visible. He watches me with eyes full of hatred.
There is another man standing beside him. He looks to be in his late fifties and seems less cold than the man with the gray eyes.
There is nothing else in this white room—no furniture other than the chair he sits on.
I’m no longer in a cold room. The wooden floor is warm, and now my shivering is solely from fear.
What do these people want to do to me?I don’t get to dwell on the whats and whys, because the man speaks.
“Avira Bennett,” he spits, his voice filled with venom.
My breath gets stuck in my throat.He thinks I’m Avi.This is bad. Very, very bad.
I nod.He can’t know I’m not her.I don’t know what he’ll do to me if he finds out I’m not her, but that fear is nothing compared to the thought of what he would do to Avi if he finds out I’m not her.
Whatever he planned to do to my sister, he’ll have to do to me instead. No matter how horrific what he had in store for her was, I will face it. This is infinitely better than letting her go through it. I’m grateful to take her place. I can’t bear to see her get hurt.
“Why am I here?” I breathe out, trying to hold back the tremble in my voice, but it leaks through.
“To pay for your father’s sins.”
He holds a serious grudge against my uncle; that much is clear from the hatred written on his face. I’m very good at judging people’s emotions from their expressions, and everything that his face is telling me is a matter of concern for me. I’ve never seen hatred of this intensity in anyone’s eyes for anyone. And all of it is directed at me.
He looks away from me, as if my very sight disgusts him, and turns to the older man.
“Call everyone here.”
The older man leaves, leaving my kidnapper and me alone in the small room. His eyes fix on me again, but I avoid his gaze. It’s too intense to hold.
“Weakling,” he scoffs, which makes me look into his eyes again.
“I don’t get kidnapped every day.”
