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She snaps and bends out of sight. Then she straightens up and holds her stiletto heel aloft. The point glints for a second, and then she slams it down onto my wrist just beyond the manacle.
Molten pain explodes through my forearm as the heel pieces through flesh, but it doesn’t stop there. Like a woman possessed, Mara repeatedly slams her hell down onto my wrist while screaming bloody murder.
“You have no fucking idea!” she screams, her hair swinging wildly as she beats down again and again. “No fucking idea what I’ve had to do, what I have had to sacrifice to get this far! You think you can kill me? You think you can keep me from my child? That baby is mine, and I am going to make sure that it never even gets an inkling that you ever existed!”
I can only keep quiet for so long before the sickening pain becomes overwhelming. A wail of agony tears from my dry throat. Warm blood splashes across my thigh, and the wet, sick sounds of impacted flesh begin to crunch. Mara doesn’t stop, she doesn’t pause, and she continues as the heel stabs through flesh, breaks small bones, and splits joints.
“Fuck you!” she screams, then she tosses her shoe aside. My hand is long absent of sensation, but out of the corner of my eye, Mara grasps onto something and starts twisting. Blood pours, and I slip in and out of consciousness until a sickening stab of hot pain flashes up to my elbow. Reflex forces me to curl in on myself, and as I roll over, a nauseating realization sweeps over me.
I rolled over.
Because my wrist was free.
Warmth pours against my abdomen, and I look down through tears of pain.
My left hand is gone.
What the fuck?
What remains is a mangled, heavily bleeding stump of twisted flesh and bone. The sound of horror that escapes me doesn’t sound human. Whipping around to Mara, she’s laughing with a twisted, crazed look in her eyes while she holds my severed hand aloft.
“Thanks. Now I know what to serve to Alena tonight for dinner!”
31
KRISTOF
She took my hand.
It’s not real. It can’t be.
There’s no way things have become this dire, that I’ve fallen so helplessly low with the woman I love miles away in the hands of someone so cruel.
I never saw the signs.
Mara was always cold, always calculated, but this is different. Power and greed have gone to her head. Or maybe she was always so fucked up and I just never saw it because we’re partly cut from the same cloth. I can’t tell.
I can’t tell anything anymore.
My arm grows numb as the fire of pain dies. Trapped in the smothering darkness of my cell, I can’t even tell if my eyes are closed. It’s all the same.
“Kristof?”
I know that voice. I love that voice.
“Kristof?”
It drifts to me like a dream, and I shift up the frozen wall, flexing one shoulder for support. That voice cuts through me like a razor, and exhausted warmth sweeps behind my eyes.
“Alena?” I croak, opening my eyes.
She hurries toward me through the darkness, looking every bit as beautiful as the last time I saw her. My heart skips a beat, and when she drops down next to me, I instantly reach out for her. Alena takes my hand, and warmth blooms up my arm. My fingertips tingle, and Alena grabs at me, her brow dipping as her eyes brim with worry.
“Oh, Kristof,” she gasps, her hand sliding up to my elbow. “What happened to you? What did they do?”
Her voice is as clear as a bell, and her touch is so firm that it has to be real.
Is it finally over?
