Chapter 10 Allegra
ALLEGRA
Iwake violently unable to separate the nightmare from the reality of this heavy, drug-induced sleep. It’s pitch black. I sit up, but I don’t know where I am. Sweat trickles down my back. My breaths come short and ragged, keeping time with my pounding heart.
I look around the dark space as my eyes adjust. I’m not cold. Not freezing. Not shivering in that damp, wet-earth cold. No smell of spilled wine. I look up at the prisms of light filtering in through stained glass and I know where I am. I remember.
My racing heart slows to thuds.
I remember.
As if on cue, my hand begins to throb. Because I remember that, too.
Pain.
A sob breaks the utter stillness of the place, and it takes me a moment to realize that that sound? It’s me.
I’m afraid to look down.
Afraid to see what I know I’ll find.
But I have to make myself do it. I have to make myself look. It would be weakness not to.
The thick duvet covers me, warm and soft and safe.
No. Not safe. Nothing is safe. Nothing has been safe for a very, very long time.
The space beside me is empty. His place. He didn’t sleep here last night.
But he came for me.
I recall the war of bullets and when that door opened, when I heard again the terrible sound of heavy metal creaking along that filthy floor, how I wanted to die. Oh, how I wanted to die.
My unbandaged hand throbs. I take a deep breath in and I turn my gaze down. This pain isn’t from a knife wound. It’s bruised from when Malek forced the ring.
Uncurling my fingers, I look for it now. My mother’s ring. Her blood still on it, after all those years. Cruel that. The cruelest thing he did. He who professed to have loved her had hated her more than any of the other monsters in her life.
But the ring isn’t there. It’s gone. I ripped it from my finger.
Four fingers on each hand now. Matchy-matchy.
I close my eyes. The place where my little finger was throbs.
Phantom pain. Sensation when there is nothing there.
Did my mother feel it every time they took another one?
No. She would have only felt real pain. I shake my head to rid myself of the memories.
To let them go. To make them let me go. I don’t know what’s real, what’s not.
Did she know what was real? What wasn’t?
I think she’d gone half-mad by the time they’d finished with her.
I don’t want to think about that now. I don’t want to remember it. Why do I remember it so clearly? Like it just happened. Like five years haven’t passed. It’s the drugs. It must be. They’re confusing past and present, memory and reality.
Time to look at my right hand. The one that won’t feel phantom pain yet. Only real pain.
I do it. Finally, I do it and I have to muffle the sound of my cry. Because this? This is real. The bloody bandage. It’s very real. And I know what’s underneath.
What’s not underneath.
I need to focus now.
The ring.
I need to get my mother’s ring.
A snore comes from the corner of the room startling me.
I almost scream, but then I see the woman there.
She’s sitting on a chair. Slumped on it.
Asleep. It’s the nurse who assisted the doctor Cassian had brought.
A female doctor. For me. So I’d feel safe.
As if I could ever feel safe again. Cassian couldn’t protect me from Malek.
He couldn’t keep me safe. He broke his promise.
If the nurse wakes, she’ll call Cassian.
They’ve been sedating me. I don’t want to be sedated anymore, and I need to get that ring, so I’m quiet as I push the blanket off and slide my legs over the bed.
Someone dressed me in a white nightgown of the softest cotton.
My bare feet touch the carpet by the bed, and I stand.
For a moment, I’m dizzy. Swaying. I take hold of the post nearest me until the spell passes.
Focus. The ring. I need to get the ring.
I walk slowly toward the door, warm carpet giving way to cold stone. I open the door with my good hand, keeping the other at my side, not wanting to look at it. It throbs, feels like it weighs a ton. If anything, it should feel lighter.
The church is dark. Moonlight filters in through the stained-glass windows here too. A light is on over the stove. I look for movement. For soldiers. For someone to stop me, but there’s no one. For a moment, I think I’m alone. I think maybe he left me here alone.
A panic begins to rise at the thought, but then I hear voices. Two men.
I know them both.
Cassian.
Jet.
They were both there at the Maestro’s house.
A sliver of light spills out of the study door which stands ajar.
I make my legs move, needing to walk close to the wall for support, fingertips brushing it as I make my way toward the study. Dead lie beneath my feet. Bones in boxes inside the earth. I try not to think about them.
Cassian and Jet are talking in lowered voices. I can’t make out what they’re saying. I’m not here to eavesdrop though. I just need the ring.
I push the door open the rest of the way.
They turn at once, conversation abruptly stopping.
Cassian’s back is to me, so it’s Jet I see first. He’s facing the door. His jaw tenses and he tries not to look at my bandaged hand.
Cassian’s shoulders tighten, shirt stretched tight over them as muscles flex. He turns to look at me and the air shifts. Something crackles between us as Cassian takes me in.
I blink. I can’t get lost in those eyes. Not now.
“Allegra.” Cassian sets his drink on the edge of the desk and comes toward me. “You should be in bed.”
He’s so tall. With my combat boots the difference is a little less, but barefoot, I need to crane my neck to look up at him.
He scans my face, gaze shifting to my bandaged hand.
I don’t like what I see in it. I don’t like his pity.
I was a good little victim, wasn’t I? The one thing I swore I’d never be again.
I was exactly that. Malek took me back to that place, back in time and I was exactly that.
“The ring,” I say, my voice sharp, not like me at all.
“Let me take you back to bed, Allegra.”
I shake my head, pull out of his grasp. “I need the ring. Where is it?”
“Tomorrow. It’s late now. Let’s go to bed.”
I shake my head, pull farther away. I don’t want to go to bed.
I know the nightmares that await me there in that drugged dark.
I can hear the whispers now. I close my eyes to try to make it stop, but it’s like they’ve been there for years, just biding their time, like they knew this would happen again. Like they knew it wasn’t over.
“Where is it?” I demand too loudly. I turn to Jet who sets his drink down. I don’t like how he’s looking at me either.
I see it then. On Cassian’s desk. Sitting right there in the center of it, the diamonds still stained with her blood or my blood. Hard to say. He didn’t clean it.
I take a step toward it, but Cassian grabs my arm to stop me.
“Allegra. You don’t want that thing.”
I look up at him, his face is blurred. I wipe my good hand across my cheek, and it comes away wet. I’m crying. I’m fucking crying again. Like a good little victim. Just like a good fucking victim.
I shove him away, walk toward the desk. “It was my mother’s.
” I tell him flatly, angrily. “It was the last finger they took and when they brought her back, she had it in the palm of her bloody hand like they gave it to her afterwards. Like they put it right there for her to hold except she couldn’t hold it.
She couldn’t hold anything anymore. Her hand was a stump.
” My voice breaks, my throat so tight I can’t breathe because I can see her.
I can see her that last time after they’d taken her.
I see her face, the ghost of her. What was left of her.
How cold she was. How small in my arms. How she shook.
Couldn’t stop shaking. I’m embarrassed to say how monstrous I thought her hands looked, all bloody and butchered with stubs for fingers.
Nothing matchy-matchy there.
I set my hands on either side of my head. “I can’t make it stop,” I say.
“Shit. Allegra,” Cassian starts, his hands on my shoulders.
No. No. I shake my head hard to clear the visions. To stop the whispering voices. Stalking the rest of the way across the room to the desk, I reach to scoop up the ring, but Jet grabs my wrist stopping me.
I meet his eyes, a forest to Cassian’s ocean.
I try to pull free but only manage to stumble backward.
Cassian catches me and holds me in his arms while Jet keeps my wrist in his and in that moment, I’m caught between both men.
Just for a moment we all stand trapped in time the silence too heavy around us.
Jet’s eyes shift to Cassian and Cassian’s grip on me tightens.
Jet’s eyes narrow. They’re communicating something in their silence.
There’s something between them, these men, something old, something that belongs only to them.
Jet clears his throat, shifts his gaze to me and I think he might say something, but he changes his mind or maybe I was wrong.
Maybe he wasn’t going to say anything. He releases me and stalks out of the study.
He slams the door so hard behind him that I feel the rattle of it in my bones.
“Let me take you to bed,” Cassian says gently, but I whirl on him, reaching for that ring. He stops me before I get it and pulls me to him. I shove him away, struggling to free myself. “Stop. Allegra. Stop.”
I don’t stop. I fight him, pounding my fists against his chest, my damaged hand aching, red creeping along the white bandage. He’s gentle with me, holding me, taking the beating while holding back the wrist of my bandaged hand.
“You promised.” I hear myself saying over and over again. The room is a blur around him, blood pounding in my ears, my head. “You promised to keep me safe! You promised. You promised.” My voice breaks, my throat hoarse, my body tired, so tired. It must be the drugs.
He lifts me off the ground at the moment my knees give way, and I struggle against him twisting and turning and screaming bloody murder as he carries me back to his bedroom, back to his bed.
The woman, the nurse who’d been asleep earlier is on her feet the instant we’re back. She scrubs her face, mutters apologies. Cassian curses her.
“Get a sedative,” he commands, furious as he lays me down.
“No. No. I don’t want that. I don’t want it!” I shake my head.
“Shh, Allegra. It’s okay. I’m going to stay with you. I’m going to be right here with you when you wake up. I promise.”
“Liar! Liar!” I scream through tears as he holds me down and I feel the prick of the needle.
“You promised and you broke your promise!” The effects are almost immediate, a sensation of cold, a relaxing of muscle.
It starts at my toes and my fingertips and works its way inward.
I would welcome it, the loss of control, but I know what’s coming when I close my eyes. I know and I’m terrified.
I shake my head as Cassian lays me on the pillow. “Shh, babygirl. Shh. I’m not going to leave you alone.”
“I’m scared,” I say, clutching his shirt. My voice is quieter because the drug is working. I’m going back into that darkness, those whispers louder, my mother trembling in my arms. “I’m so scared.”
He unravels my hand from his shirt.
“I’m here. I’m not leaving you. I won’t leave you alone ever again. I swear it. I fucking swear it.”
“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I say as my eyes close, unsure who I say it to. It’s so quiet a whisper I don’t know if anyone hears.
“I’m real,” Cassian says as darkness closes in on me. “I’m real.”