Chapter 15
The marble was cold. But that cold was nothing compared to the ice that had settled in her stomach.
Aurora stayed in the dark hallway for what felt like forever after Maximilian Volkov's door closed and the lock turned. The silence of the penthouse returned, heavier and more accusatory than before.
She was on the floor, her nightgown torn, her body sticky, the freezing marble pressed against her skin. She felt... obliterated.
It hadn't been the cold, punitive, hate-filled violation of the piano night. That had been simple. A monster being a monster.
This.
This had been something different. Confused.
Desperate. His vulnerability had been a more potent weapon than his cruelty could ever be.
He had used her to anchor himself, and her body, her stupid, traitorous body, had responded.
Not with pleasure, not with surrender, but with a kind of...
recognition. Like two animals clutching each other in the dark, both bleeding from different wounds.
The hatred. The pure, clean hatred that fueled her, that powered Sokolov's plan, that gave shape to her Melody of Vengeance... was stained.
The monster she hated had nightmares. The arsonist she planned to expose screamed “Fire!” in his dreams, like a victim.
It didn't make sense.
With a pain that was half physical, half existential, Aurora got to her feet. Every muscle protested. She limped back to her room, a ghostly figure in the luxurious darkness.
She didn't shower. She couldn't. She just peeled off the torn remnants of the nightgown, pulled on clean clothes in the dark, and crawled under the covers.
She didn't sleep. She lay there, eyes open, watching the city lights pulse, desperately trying to fit the pieces together.
The Proof: He bought the academy's land for almost nothing. Fact. The Nightmare: He's terrified of fire. Fact.
An arsonist doesn't fear fire. An arsonist doesn't scream as if he's burning.
The straight line of her revenge had become a knot.
Morning came, not with the sun, but with the familiar click of her bedroom door. The Shadow. Bringing breakfast.
Aurora pretended to be asleep. She heard the tray being placed on the table. Heard the footsteps retreating.
The routine. The routine was the only thing that made sense.
At nine o'clock sharp, she got up. She dressed. She braced herself for the pain.
She walked to the white room. Dr. Hein, the German, was already there, his metal tools gleaming under the fluorescent lights.
But the chair in the corner was empty.
For the first time since the torture sessions began, Maximilian Volkov wasn't there.
His absence was a scream.
Was he ashamed? Did he not want to look at her? Or was he afraid she would see him, now that she knew his weakness?
Dr. Hein didn't seem to notice. He was irritated.
“Late,” he growled, glancing at his watch. “Two minutes.”
“Sorry.”
“I don't care about your apologies. The hand.”
Aurora extended it. The session began.
Without Volkov's presence, the pain felt cleaner, but somehow worse. There was no focus for her hatred. Only the pure, clinical pain. Hein seemed to be in a particularly sadistic mood. He forced her fingers backward so hard she bit her lip until she tasted blood.
“The Master informed me that your progress is too slow,” Hein said, applying more pressure to her thumb. “He is not... satisfied.”
Aurora choked, tears welling up. “He's not satisfied?” After last night? The casual cruelty of it almost made her laugh.
“More,” Hein ordered. “You're not trying hard enough.”
She endured. She endured the entire hour, her muffled moans echoing in the sterile room. When he finally released her, her left hand was a pulsing claw of agony, swollen and red.
She left the room, trembling, and nearly collided with the Shadow.
The impassive housekeeper looked at her.
“The Master is waiting for you. In the gym.”
Aurora froze. The gym?
She didn't even know there was a gym. In all those months, she'd only ever seen her room, the music room, the living room, and the white torture room.
“Where?”
The Shadow merely pointed to the end of the main hallway, toward a set of frosted glass doors that Aurora had always assumed led to a closet.
Fear returned, cold and sudden. The routine was broken. He was summoning her. After his absence. After last night.
This was the execution. He had seen her vulnerable, and now he would destroy her for it.
Her heart pounded against her ribs. She walked. Each step felt like walking on broken glass.
She pushed through the glass doors.
The room was enormous. Glass walls, like the rest of the penthouse, overlooked the western horizon. It was filled with black metal machines that looked like more sophisticated torture instruments than Hein's. Treadmills, bikes, weights.
The air smelled of rubber, metal, and sweat.
He wasn't there.
The room was empty.
“Maximilian?” she called, her voice weak.
Silence. Only the low hum of the air conditioning.
She took a step inside. The floor was dark wood, not marble.
She heard it. The sound of water. A shower.
Off to the side, another frosted glass door. A bathroom? A sauna?
She waited. She didn't know what to do. Run? Wait?
She was a prisoner. She waited.
She stood in the middle of the gym, feeling small and pathetically human in her cashmere sweater, surrounded by machines of power and pain.
The shower door opened with a hiss of steam.
He stepped out.
And Aurora Vitali's world stopped spinning.
His back was to her. A white towel hung loosely, dangerously low on his hips. He was drying his hair with another towel, his body still damp from the steam.
She had felt his bare chest in the dark. She had seen his muscles.
But she had never seen his back.
It wasn't a man's back. It was a battlefield.
Where her scar, on her face, was a distorted map, his was a continent of agony.
The skin on his shoulders, running down to the middle of his back, was a landscape of ruin. These weren't scars from cuts or wounds. They were scars from fire.
Extensive. Ugly.
It was a mass of waxy, shiny, puckered tissue, where healthy skin merged with masses of red and silver keloids. The skin had melted over the muscles of his back, like candle wax poured over a steel sculpture.
It was… worse.
It was a thousand times worse than hers. Her scar had ruined her beauty. His had tried to kill him.
She gasped. The sound was loud in the silence of the gym.
He froze.
The vulnerability from the night before returned, but in a different form. It wasn't the terror of a nightmare. It was the stillness of an animal caught in a trap. He didn't turn. He just stood there, his back bare to her. The proof of his own hell.
And everything clicked into place.
The scream in the dark. POZHAR! Fire!
The man who had nightmares about fire… had fire etched into his back.
The man she had accused of watching her burn… had been burning himself.
The silhouette in the doorway. The man she thought had been standing there, watching.
Nausea hit her so hard she had to lean against a treadmill.
He wasn't watching.
The thought was blasphemy. It was the ultimate heresy.
He wasn't watching. He was…
She couldn't finish the thought.
“The fire,” she whispered. The word came out like a sob.
He didn't move.
“The Academy,” she said, louder, tears streaming down her face. But they weren't tears of anger. They were tears of confusion so deep it was painful. “You… you were there.”
He slowly draped the towel around his neck.
“What were you doing there?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Your back…”
He turned.
In an instant, the vulnerability was gone.
The man who turned wasn't a fire survivor. He wasn't the terrified man she'd held in the dark.
He was the Master.
His gray eyes were shards of ice. The mask of total control was back, colder and harder than ever. He looked at her with contempt that made her recoil. He seemed… disgusted. With her. For having seen.
He walked to a counter and picked up a clean black shirt. He pulled it on, hiding the evidence, pulling the cotton over the ruined skin.
He stared at her.
“Are you questioning me?” he asked, his voice a low, dangerous hiss.
“Your back…” she stammered. “You… you were burned. In the Academy fire.”
She wanted him to say it. To explain. To untangle the knot in her head.
He laughed.
It was the ugliest sound she'd ever heard. A short, dry sound, utterly devoid of humor.
He walked up to her. He stopped so close she could smell the soap and steam. He raised his hand and touched her scar, on her face. His fingers were cold, clinical.
“We all have our burns, Aurora,” he said, his voice laced with cold venom.
The shock of the previous night, the desperate intimacy—all of it came undone. He was back. The monster.
“But yours...” she insisted, her tears drying as anger and frustration took over. “They're...”
“The difference?” he interrupted, leaning in, his voice a cruel whisper. “I paid for mine. They cost me. Yours...” He looked her up and down with disdain. “Yours just made you a cheap asset.”
The cruelty hit her like a slap.
He was doing this on purpose. Using his own pain as a shield. Reminding her that she was his property, nothing more.
“Get out.”
“But the documents...” she tried, desperate to understand. “You bought the land! You profited!”
He grabbed her chin. Hard. His fingers dug into her jaw, forcing her to look him in the eyes.
“Have you learned so little?” he hissed. “You still think you have the right to ask questions? You still think my reasons are any of your business?”
He pushed her back. She stumbled.
“You are an instrument. Nothing more. You're here to play. Now, go tend to your burns,” he said, his voice full of contempt. “And leave me alone with mine.”
He turned, dismissing her.
“And, Aurora.”
She stopped at the door, trembling with rage and confusion.
“Your staccato is still a mess. I want the Melody ready by the end of the week. Or the sessions with Dr. Hein will seem like a vacation.”
He dismissed her.
She ran. She fled the studio, ran down the hallway, and locked herself (a useless lock) in her room.
She collapsed on the floor.
The hatred returned. But now it was different. Confused. Sickening.
Fact A (The Proof): He is the arsonist. He bought the land. He is cruel. He violated her. He tortures her.
Fact B (The Doubt): He's terrified of fire. He has burn scars worse than hers.
Both things couldn't be true.
A man doesn't set fire to a building and then run inside to burn himself nearly to death.
So... what was the truth?
Sokolov's plan. The entire plan depended on Fact A. The Gala. The public exposure of Maximilian Volkov as an arsonist.
But what if he wasn't?
What if Henrik Sokolov... was wrong?
Or...
A new thought, colder and more terrifying, crept into her mind.
What if Sokolov knew that Volkov wasn't the arsonist? What if the plan wasn't about justice... but about something else?
She looked at her left hand, swollen and purple from the session with Hein.
Tend to yours.
His cruelty. Why was he so cruel if he was innocent? Why did he let her believe he was the monster? Why did he punish her for discovering the one thing that could prove his innocence?
She no longer had a clear enemy.
She was trapped. Trapped between a monster who had nightmares and a savior she had never truly known.
She was alone. Completely and terribly alone, with a time bomb in the bathroom cabinet and a ghost in the hallway.
Doubt was a worse poison than hatred had ever been.