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What the hell had I done?
That cave was the only reason I was still alive, the only hope I had of staying that way, and I’d just welcomed a potential killer inside with open arms.
Clinging to the rocks, I stared at the back of his foreign uniform, rising and falling with every raspy, ragged breath, as tears of hatred blurred my vision.
I pictured Odie’s sweet, round cheeks. Da’s big, blond beard. Sheila’s severed arm, lying in the smoldering, blood-smeared wreckage of my home. A drone telling me to surrender or die.
In my mind, this stranger morphed into the singular embodiment of the entire Russian military. He was the reason my family was dead. He was the man behind the machine. He was the missiles and the ship and the tanks and the drones.
And he deserved to die. Not them.
Shoving off from the wall, I crossed the inlet in two strokes and hauled myself out of the water. Squatting down in front of the sailor—or officer, based on the fanciness of his uniform—who was still lying unconscious on his side, I gave his shoulder a hard shove. He rolled onto his back without a fight, eyelids closed and lips parted.
I tore my gaze away from his hauntingly handsome face and focused instead on the patches and medallions decorating his chest—the ones that told me who he really was.
The ones that reminded me what he’d taken from me.
I knew I was freezing by the way my fingers shook as I wrapped them around his left bicep, but all I could feel was a blinding-hot lava flow of rage as I yanked on his arm, desperate to roll him into the inlet.
“Get … out!” I grunted, pulling and shoving, but he was too heavy, and I was too exhausted. I’d lost my wellies in the sea after my cliff jump, so every push and shove caused my knees and bare feet to grind harder against the pebbles on the beach until they eventually slid out from under me completely.
I landed with a shriek on the Russian’s chest, and when he didn’t move, I lay there, draped over his unconscious, bleeding body, and wept.
CHAPTER 8
DAMIEN
Iknew I was dreaming the moment I saw her again, but everything felt different. Wrong.
We weren’t in the forest anymore—we were in a house. A house that made my skin crawl and my heart race. A house that felt alive and evil. Something bad had happened there. A man …
My head throbbed, and my ribs ached, and a few of my knuckles felt broken. The intensity of the pain confused me. I normally couldn’t feel pain in my dreams.
Even the girl seemed different. She was younger now, but every bit as beautiful. She stood in the middle of a tobacco-stained kitchen, staring at me with big, worried eyes—eyes that I could now tell were as green as the forest where I’d first met her—before she glanced down at a lock of black hair in her tiny, trembling fist.
Reaching up, I touched the side of my head and immediately hissed in pain. Not only was my hair completely gone, but the wound I found there was laid open and oozing blood.
Taking a slow step toward me, the girl’s eyes glistened with unshed tears, and her full lips quivered as they pulled into a frown. I wanted to kiss them, to make them curve the other way … until she reached up to touch my butchered head.
I jerked away immediately. Embarrassed. Ashamed. I didn’t want her to pity me. I didn’t want her to know what had happened. I couldn’t exactly remember myself, but I knew it was shameful. I knew it would make her look at me differently. So, I glared at her and watched as her sad, stunning face crumpled in response. Throwing the lock of hair on the floor, the girl turned and sprinted toward the front door.
She yelled something at me, a few things, but all I could process was that final look on her face and the hurt in her voice just before she slammed the door shut behind her.
I couldn’t let her leave like that. I’d just gotten her back. If I didn’t catch her, didn’t make things right, I might never see her again.
Bolting out the door, I found myself free from the grimy grayscale of the evil house and plunged into a Technicolor dream world. The girl’s hair glimmered in the sun like spun cooper as she sprinted across a green cemetery under a cloudless blue sky. Birds sang, and church bells rang, and my blood thrummed in my veins as I pushed myself to run faster. The closer I got to her, the more my pain faded until we were just a tangle of arms and legs rolling in the soft grass.
Turning onto my back, I pulled her against my chest and—after a few seconds of struggle—felt her tense body surrender and melt into mine. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Like warm water being poured over a block of ice. I would have held her like that forever if I could have, but the edges of my awareness were already starting to blur.
There was so much I wanted to say before I woke up. So many questions I wanted to ask. Who was she? When would I see her again? How did I know her? Why did she make me feel this way? But just like the last time I’d seen her, the words seemed to slam against a steel door in my throat. So, I fought harder to push them out. When the colors began to fade, I held her tighter, refusing to let go. When I could no longer feel the weight of her on my chest, I coiled her hair around my fist and pressed my lips to the top of her head.
And when the girl in my arms finally vanished, along with the bolts and locks around my throat, I whispered into the darkness between our two worlds, “Remember me. Please … please come back.”
Everything hurt. Inside. Outside. My lungs, my throat. My head, my side. My injuries were the same as the ones from my dream, only amplified. Excruciating. And instead of warm summer grass, it felt as though I were lying in a bed of cold broken glass.
I didn’t know where I was, but I knew that I would die there. Soon. My brain was too foggy to think, my body too broken to move. I tried to remember what had happened, but nothing surfaced. My mind was a void. A vast black tunnel with no light at the end, only the wide-open gates of hell, ready and waiting.
Just then, a small sound and a slight twitch caused my labored breathing to stop altogether. Something was on me. Something heavy and alive.
