Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
ALEKSANDR VOLKOVITCH
Volkovitch Manor
“Fuck her.”
Why couldn’t I get her out of my head? My brain rampaged as I tore through my room, destroying the neatly ordered dossiers, files, and records. A trigger that would no doubt bother me once this all-consuming rage tempered out.
“Goddamn, that beautifully cunning girl. Fucking hell…”
A crash thundered in my room as I yanked my television off the wall. The monitor and resulting carnage did nothing to sate the beast viciously clawing at my sanity. Fuck, fuck. FUCK!
“Where are you? You infuriatingly intelligent girl…”
Audrey Ellsworth.
Lenochka. My Printsessa.1
Mine.
The cold-hearted bitch, the Ellsworth Princess, whose mask was affixed so tightly I did not think even her inner circle had seen what lay beneath. Even I, the unlucky bastard, questioned if I had ever truly known the dark truths of what haunted her.
If the skeletons and burdens we’d shared had even been honest moments where we lowered our guards to someone who would understand, or if they had just been another game.
A test to challenge me, to prevent me from getting too close to that fragile softness she had learned to hide.
To the point where very few, if any, had glimpsed that vulnerability underneath the facade of ice and thorns she broadcasted so easily to the world and her so-called friends.
“Why can’t I get her out of my head?” Why can’t she leave me alone…
Crashing continued as I sank into the chair at my desk, Lenochka still rampant in my thoughts…her pretty face still appearing like a ghost in my eyes…
She was shrouded in secrets, both for the Ellsworth and Yates names. Surrounded in darkness that came from harbouring truths that, quite honestly, never needed to see the light of day. Oh, the destruction they could bring to the order of this town.
There had been a time I had volunteered to help carry the burden.
To unload her delicate shoulders of the weight that bore down on her, yet she had refused—unwilling to trust that I volunteered without strings, without demands of more.
Refusing to accept that maybe her happiness was the goal I was always chasing, sprinting towards at full speed until she chose to walk away.
That choice she made had ramifications that she still refused to face.
That decision was the first crack in the armour I wore every day, something that irritated me and dug into my soul—her unrelenting presence in my chest, the bond neither of us cared to face.
A hurt that clawed at me whenever I watched over our secret in the silence of the room next to me each night, that burrowed its way in whenever I was weak.
All these little moments in time still reminded me of that brief period she had allowed herself to fully open up to me—almost three years ago now—which had been and still was the highlight of all the years I had been forced to live here in this godforsaken fucked-up town.
I equally admired and despised everything that girl embodied.
I had been the only one at Alabastor Prep who had seen through her charms, who’d never once succumbed to her games.
Instead, I had chosen to goad her, instigate her ruthless side, and spur her on with taunts and barbs.
Amusingly, I watched as she wove them all under her spell and became the leader of both her friend group and Prep all, seemingly, without breaking a sweat.
But during the years we attended University, my resistance cracked, and I became the fool who had fallen for her wit and charm.
The girl was a master at creating the image she wanted people to see.
And me, I had walked right into her biggest deception of all, unknowing but unapologetic when her goal became clear.
The way she had orchestrated the drama of it all herself—a story of a king with no crown, and a girl destined to rule it all once she finally clawed her way from the secrets she had been buried in since her adoption to a founding family here at six years old. The story of us as she wanted it known.
She had stepped onto campus already surrounded by this town’s elite—the Kenton brothers, the Remington heir, and both the vonBermere princess and that black-sheep bastard cousin of theirs, Kellan vonBermere—ready and willing to burn it all to the ground, appearing uncaring for the aftermath it would cause… the fall of the town’s elite.
Her brazenness had ensnared me then, this girl who I had known much longer than those of The Cove understood. It was her trust that would embolden me now, knowing my time was almost up and her choice needed to be made yesterday.
“Where is she?” Watching the security cameras, I toggled from room to room, briefly pausing on one that showed a secret I would die in protection of before I clicked over to the next and the next. “When will you admit it's time to come home?”
Her looks and voice were like a siren’s song to everyone around her, slowly beckoning them in, making her virtually untouchable to all but me.
Even after she had played her games, pulled strings, and unleashed hell in her attempt to push me away, the desire to fall into her was steep, bordering on unbearable until we had finally given in.
In the end, I had been the one left afraid of who she was becoming—forced to be.
Prideful about her stepping into herself, but saddened that she…
and I…both knew she would not be able to stay locked inside the bubble we had created for ourselves—until reality came crashing in and fate declared that it had other plans we were prisoners to follow.
The girl who had been under your skin for fifteen years.
Those vicious pre-dawn coloured eyes.
The little girl whose raven black hair was always covered in bramble as the three of us…
“Fuck. FUCK!” Yanking at my hair, I let my eyes fall closed. Memories still flashed past as I struggled to breathe in and out…struggled to keep my grasp on the last threads of composure before I said ‘fuck it’ and drove over and laid eyes on her myself.
The three years we attended Prep together were the best years I had spent in this hellhole we called a town.
As a founding family heir myself, I was always held to stricter rules.
As the son of the Volkovitch line, my family was feared.
My reputation often preceded me—until the girl with fairy eyes and a cunning smile cracked the facade and lit my world up in smoke.
I spent that time watching her puppeteer and bend the wills of those who bowed to her at the school.
I watched as she became one of the most powerful players her year—and mine—had seen, achieving a spot close to the top but never quite surpassing me, much to her chagrin.
Audrey had always been intelligent, far beyond many of our peers, but she had never been able to see past her own rose-coloured glasses.
Never been able to separate her need for control from the power it had given her, and it had been brutal watching the way her intelligence had weaponized when her emotions failed her so.
I loved taunting her, refusing to play by her rules.
But there was the rare occurrence when her walls came down, and I could see the stunning monster underneath—the one that matched my own.
Those times were few and very far between, each one surrounding the nightmares that haunted her, the ones she never realized tied us closer together than she thought.
That secret I would burn in hell for once she found out, and one I regretted hiding from her since she walked away from us two years ago.
“I see myself running, running and screaming. For help, for someone to hear me,” she once told me late at night in the forest by the cliffs.
“Then it all stops, and a young boy is there.”
“A boy?” Looking off into the shadowed darkness, I waited, hoping she had finally learned the truth of that night, of her first one in Alabastor Cove.
“Yes…a boy. All I know is that he had ice-blond hair. And his eyes…” She let out a sigh and turned her head to me, leaning in as I lent her my strength to finish. “Soulless eyes. Like he saw right through me.”
“And then?”
“He left, just vanished into the trees.”
I could still remember that night in startling clarity.
I witnessed the first true crack in her armour.
She let me see the fiery rage she shielded inside herself, pushed down so deep, I was not even sure she knew how to drag it out anymore.
Many other nights would follow that one, hours and hours of slowly having her claws sunk into my skin, only to be yanked out by the woman herself when she realized what being seen together would cause.
Yes, I realized then that fate was no friend to me.
My dice were cast, and the chains slowly choking me were not by my last name, but rather by the two that taunted me all through my final years at Prep—the ones Audrey would soon claim as her own.
The golden heiress who looked like an angel but hid a true devil under her skin.
Yet…you’ll always want her.
I still longed for her to come back, apologize, and tell me that it had been a misguided mistake. Tell me that what was shared was not just infatuation, but more…Relieve me from the hatred that grew within me every day at the feelings I was unable to shake.