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I cut sharply across Dragan. “Wait a minute. What did you just say?”

14

Viktoriya

Icollect the spare key from Mrs. Ferraro in 4B.

Mrs. Ferraro likes Troy, but she doesn’t like me. I’ve known it for months from the hostile glares she shoots me when we pass in the hall. Troy’s noisy outbursts annoy the neighbors, but I’m the one responsible for setting him off. She gives me a derisive once-over, presses the key into my palm without a word, and snaps her door shut in my face.

The apartment I share with Troy is silent but messier than usual. The sink is piled high with dirty dishes. Crumbs are scattered on the counter, the trash is overflowing, and the tap is still dripping.

None of this is my problem. I’m getting in and out before anyone else knows I’m here.

I keep my escape fund in the bedroom, hidden behind the loose baseboard under the window. I crouch down on the worn carpet and work the board free with my fingers, the exact way I’ve done a hundred times before.

I reach into the dark hollow, and my fingers close around—nothing.

It’s gone.

My heart thunders in my throat. I run wildly back through every grocery trip and every pitiful refund I hid here, searching for the moment I was careless. In the days before I was taken, there were times Troy watched me with a little smirk. I told myself it was just his usual contempt, but he knew. He knew. The money was already gone.

I don’t hear him come in.

One moment I’m crouching on the bedroom floor with my hand in the wall, and the next, an explosion of white-hot pain tears up the right side of my head. The world tilts violently. The floor rushes up to meet me, my ears ringing as the carpet scrapes against my cheek.

“What the—? Cora?” Troy’s voice cracks over me like a whip. He hesitates for an agonizing second. “What the hell are you doing?”

I push myself up with my good hand, my vision swimming. He’s looming over me, a dark shadow blocking out the light.

He kicks the loose board, and I flinch, curling inward automatically.

“You were trying to run away?” he sneers, stepping into my space. “You think you can just walk out of here and someone’s going to take you in? Who? Who would have you?”

I keep my mouth shut. I know better than to answer.

“Nothing to say?” he spits, looking down at me with pure disgust. “Of course not. Pathetic. You’d last five minutes out there, and you know it—which is why you’re right back here on my floor.”

His floor. His apartment.

His rules, his money, his fists.

I knew it was reckless to come here when I sped away from that gas station, but I came anyway. For the sake of a few dollars? Maybe. Or maybe this apartment is a slow poison I don’t know how to stop drinking.

A ghost of a memory ripples through me, and my mind instinctually moves toward it. I find myself listening for a low, smoky, accented voice. A quiet, steady presence calling me printsessa, telling me the broken coffeepot doesn’t matter. A broad chest that was warm under my cheek. Heavy, lethal hands that touched me with terrifying gentleness when I was hurting.

But he’s never going to hold me again.

I ran from him at a gas station at midnight—I had to—and now there is only the carpet burning my knees, pain in my cheek, and Troy standing over me with his fists clenched.

Who would have you? No one.

Zevran handcuffed me and dragged me across state lines, but somewhere between hauling me out of that basement and buying me a vanilla Coke, I let myself imagine…

It doesn’t matter what I imagined. I set fire to that dream the moment I ran from him.

“Get up,” Troy demands. “The kitchen is a disaster. Clean it up and make breakfast.”

I swipe my palm across my wet cheek and feel a pathetic flicker of relief that he’s done hitting me.