Illusionist (Seven Sins Carnival #2)

Prologue – Nova

The smell hits first when I push through the trailer door—stale beer, his cologne, the metallic tang of grease from the generators humming behind the lot. Same smell as every night for the last twelve years. It makes me nauseous.

“Take it off.”

Roman's already inside. Of course he is. His boots are up on the table I scrub down every morning, the neck of a beer bottle clenched in his greasy fingers. I wonder if he's imagining it's my neck instead.

“Let me get out of the costume first, baby.” I keep my voice light, pretending I don't smell the danger in the air. “The crowd was good tonight. You see the take?”

“I saw the take.” He brings the bottle to his lips. “I also saw the guys in the front row drooling over your costume.”

I can't help myself—I roll my eyes. I just make sure he can't see it. “They were high-school kids, Roman.”

“And you were fifteen when I—” He cuts himself off. Drinks. I swallow down bile.

I unclasp my choker, then unlace my corset, my fingers nimble because I've literally done this a thousand times.

I kick off my boots. The padlocks come off my belt and clatter onto the vanity, one after another.

I used to like the sound my costume makes.

Now I dread taking it off after a performance.

“You danced for them,” Roman accuses. Same old song.

I hold back my sigh. “I danced for the show.”

“You arched your back. On the spike board. Like a fucking—”

“It's the act.” Finally, I turn, facing him. “Roman. It's the act. Same act I've done since I was seventeen. Same act you taught me.”

I realize I shouldn't have said that before the last word leaves my mouth.

He stands up slowly. He's always slow when it's about to be bad.

“That's right,” he hisses. “I taught you.”

I bring my hands up, trying to placate him. “Roman—”

“I taught you, and now you do it for them.”

“Baby.” I step back. The trailer's twelve feet long. There isn't much to step back into. “I do it for us. For the carnival. You know that.”

He crosses the floor in two strides and throws the bottle into the wall behind my head, and it explodes into the cabinet where I keep my picks. There's glass in my hair and beer running down my neck, but I don't complain. I'm used to it, and complaining just makes it worse.

Worried the hatred I feel for him is showing in my eyes, I look away, taking deep, even breaths. But he won't have that.

“Look at me when I'm talking to you,” he growls.

I look at him. My husband. He's gray at the temples now.

I used to think he was so handsome, with eyes like a thunderstorm and a sexy smirk.

He was thirty-two when he found me at the truck stop outside Wichita, but he's forty-four now.

Still strong. Still bigger than me by a foot and about seventy pounds.

His hand closes around my throat, not squeezing. Not yet.

“You're mine, Nova.” The words are quiet, but somehow they still seem to echo in my ears like a prison sentence.

“I know.”

It's the only right answer.

“Say it,” he demands, bringing his red face even closer.

“I'm yours,” I repeat, louder this time. I know what he wants.

“Then why—” his thumb digs in under my jaw, “—do you keep making me do this?”

He hits me with the back of his hand, and my hip hits the vanity on my way down. The world goes white at the edges. I taste copper. I taste my own stupidity, twelve years of it. I was so damn stupid for thinking this time is the last time over and over again.

“Get up.”

I look up, watching as his fists clench and unclench at his sides. He's not done with me.

“Get up, you fucking—”

He drags me up by my hair, and that's when my hand finds it. The rigging spike—the slim steel one I use to reset the lock board between shows, eight inches of tempered carbon. Like the universe sent me a present.

I drive it up into his gut. It cuts through his clothes and skin with disturbing ease.

He makes a surprised sound, not even pain, just shock that I'd ever do something to hurt him in return. When he lets go of my hair, I stumble back, but the spike stays where I put it, the wooden grip jutting out of his shirt at an angle.

“Nova.”

He looks down at it. Looks up at me. There's blood already at the corner of his mouth, a single dark bead of it, and I watch his face do something I have never once seen it do.

Roman is afraid.

“Nova… pull it out—”

“No.” I'm against the wall, staring at the blood on my hands. His? Mine? I don't know. “No, you're not supposed to. You're not supposed to pull it out, it'll—”

“Help me.” He goes down to one knee, almost like he's proposing. It's macabre. “Baby. Baby. Help me.”

“I'll get—I'll get someone…” I stammer.

“You'll get the cops is what you'll get.” His voice changes, fear melting into the fury I'm more used to hearing. “You hear me, Nova? You stabbed me. You stabbed me in our home.”

“You were—”

“I was talking to my wife,” he interrupts. “I'll tell them. I'll tell every one of them. How hysterical you are.”

I'm shaking my head in disbelief. “Roman—”

“You did it on purpose.” He's panting with one hand braced on the floor, the other curled around the wooden grip.

“You planned it. You'll never get away with it.

You hear me? Never. They'll arrest you. And I will sit in that courtroom with my scar and I will weep, Nova, I will weep for what you did to me—”

I'm moving before I decide to move.

There's a duffel bag under the bed. The one I packed three years ago and never unpacked, because some part of me has been getting ready for this night since the first time he split my lip.

I take the cash from the coffee tin. My passport from the false bottom of the lockbox he doesn't know I picked open years ago.

“Nova.” He's quieter now, slumped down like he's struggling to stay conscious. “Nova, sweetheart, come here. Come here and we'll figure it out, we'll—I won't tell, I won't, I swear on my mother—”

I grab a few more things I can’t live without, pull my duster on over the half-undone corset, and step back into my high-heeled boots.

I should say something. Something sassy, something like the cheesy lines I use during my performances. But I'm fucking done with this hell.

I open the door.

“NOVA—”

And I run.