Chapter 6 Kalina
KALINA
The darkness was all I remembered.
It swarmed over me, seeping into my mind as I was lured closer and closer to giving up. To stop fighting.
Under the kiss of the fresh air—though so brutal and bitingly cold—I lowered my guard for the first time in fourteen years.
It was only in the deepest degree of irony that I didn’t wake back up.
Shards of pain cut into me as I slowly regained consciousness. Pinpricks of tingles coasted over my skin. Further in, the throbbing intensity of the bruises Yusef had given me in that last, brutal beating had me wishing I could continue floating in the abyss of nothing.
I was used to this. That blankness. Shuttering my conscious mind was the only survival instinct I was left with after all the years of torture and pain. Of isolation and no trust. No compassion.
But this wasn’t the same. This darkness felt too heavy, like I was drugged and coerced back into the living.
I couldn’t be sure of how long I stayed out, but with more frequent wisps of sound and touches, I realized in some far-back recess of my soul that I was alive. I hadn’t died running out of that apartment and sprinting into the snow and ice.
I lived.
Just as I vowed to myself, I would die fighting for my freedom. But there was no easy war to wage against this sluggishness.
Warmth reached me in a sharp contrast. Wherever I lay, I was in a quiet place. Voices came and went. Male. A couple of women. I was almost convinced I’d heard someone crying. A baby wailing.
Have I finally lost my mind?
Is this purgatory?
Hell?
Moving my fingers was the first clue that I was very much part of the living world.
Yet, until I summoned the strength and willingness to pry my tired eyes open, I couldn’t be sure if I was back in the nightmare Erik and Yusef wanted me to endure until my marriage or if I was in the real world.
Among normal people. With the birds flying free overhead in the wide-open sky.
That woman.
The harder I tried to grasp what I recalled, what happened just before I passed out in the wintry cold, the faster the memories slipped out of my reach. Gone like figments of dreams. But I hadn’t dreamed it. Right?
Eventually, I came to, taking inventory of my body and the aches and pains it endured. No stinky odors reached my nose. That was the first clue I leaned on. Perhaps I was taken to a new location.
Oh, God.
What if Erik and Yusef found me?
Am I at my new husband’s house?
Fear lanced through me, waking me fully at that horror.
The dimly lit bedroom wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected more of the previous life I’d left behind, a meagerly decorated bedroom with a shitty mattress, or if not that, a thin cot on the floor.
Here, I was in a bed. A real one. Without bugs creeping out from the seams. No stains still damp under my body from previous users. No springs poking into my back.
A fluffy pillow hosted my head that ached and throbbed.
Sheets—clean and damn-near new with how pure white they looked—covered me. The blanket draped over my still body was plush. Warm. Expensive.
What is this?
Where am I?
Panic cut through me, pushing me straight into a twisted defense mechanism of shock. That numbness returned, an ever-reliant mask to protect me from worse horrors.
What’s going on?
Where is this place?
Nothing stood out as a clue. I was alone in this bed.
Under the dim light falling in through an enormous window that showed a distant view of the cityscape, I had more of a chance to realize I really might have been drugged.
An IV bag was hung from a stand next to the bed.
Scared and confused, I yanked the lead out from under my skin, wincing at the sting of extracting a needle so roughly.
Oh, God.
Fuck.
This was worse than what I ever could’ve imagined.
My husband must have me now. And he was drugging me to keep me docile.
Beeps sounded as soon as I flung off a strange plastic brace that was lightly pressing on my fingertip. Then these sticky pads. I wrenched them off my upper chest, appalled that someone had taken my clothes off.
Oh, fuck.
Fuck.
God.
What is going on?
A nurse entered the room, likely alerted to the beeping I’d caused from these medical things being removed. She startled, her eyes going wide at me sitting upright and fighting the sheets and covers to get up.
“Al—” The nurse hurried into the room, alarmed. “Miss Raisa.”
No.
That can’t be true.
Raisa?
My cousin?
I shook my head, delirious with fear.
She was in on this too? Was she collaborating with Erik? Without any explanation, in this shell of my mind, I latched on to the first idea that came to me. That I had to be in my husband’s home. Or in another holding cell. Somewhere.
If Erik and Yusef hadn’t yet been informed about where I was, they would be soon. And the punishment due my way for trying to escape…
Sobs left my lips as I fought the nurse. She could shut up with her urges to calm down. To stay put. To relax.
Calm down?
Relax?
I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but suck in desperate, heaving breaths and fight to get free again.
“Kalina!”
She was here. Raisa. Running into the room, she wore the same scared expression of alarm that the nurse did as she found me panting and trying to escape.
Raisa.
She wasn’t the young teenager I recalled. It’d been so long since I’d seen her. So many years had passed, and surely, she’d changed. She was no longer a young lady like I had been back then, but a woman. Taller. Stronger.
In my mad rush to break free, I let my gaze fall to her stomach. Swollen with a baby.
Oh, God. No. No!
She’d already met the same fate that I was destined for.
Bred.
Knocked up by a man to bear strong sons.
It was the whole plan. The entire purpose that Erik and Yusef had prepared me for.
No!
She couldn’t be trusted. Not when she was a participant in this nightmare.
“Alexsei,” she called out, clearly too worried to help the nurse physically restrain me. With a hand on her belly, she furrowed her brow and backed up. “Help! Ivan!”
Shaking my head violently, even when moving it at all worsened my headache, I fought it all.
Alexsei? Ivan?
I didn’t know those names. But I knew they were for men.
No men.
No one.
I didn’t want anyone to touch me and hold me captive ever again.
“Fuck.”
A tall man with short brown hair appeared in the doorway.
The sight of a tall brute like him was the final push for me to dig in harder and fight like hell. He was bigger than Yusef, muscled and the embodiment of strength, such power I could never dare to hope to fight off.
Yet, with how much that last beating had weakened me, how severely it had broken me, the worst I could do was to strike out at the nurse.
“Enough.”
The man’s voice was firm, but not with any hint of the sneer or malice Erik and Yusef doled out on me.
He caught the nurse from being flung back so hard that she’d fall to the floor.
Once she was upright, he reached for the needle she held and stuck it in my upper arm.
I cried out. It escaped as an incoherent cry of anguish, but it was already working.
Warmth dizzied me as it flowed through my veins. Breathing was easier. Details smeared on the edges of my vision.
Beneath it all, though, I remained locked in that steady state of panic. Stuck in the fear that I had been captured, that I’d be recaptured, that the one distant relative I’d hoped to have as a lifeline was in with them all.
“Enough,” the man said again.
I stared up at him, searching his serious face for a clue. Watching his blue eyes, I tried to find any hint of why I should trust him, why I should calm down and be submissive ever again.
I couldn’t.
Not when I’d come so close to escaping.
Not when I’d almost found freedom.
“Enough.” It was the third time he said it, but this time, it was softer. Not as a rebuke, but more like a plea.
I’ve heard his voice before.
That didn’t make sense. It made absolutely no sense with how addled I was with fear and hyped up from the adrenaline rush with panic.
I’d only been near Erik and Yusef. They were the only voices I’d know now.
Still, something about him relaxed me, taunting me to somehow perceive him as a source of security because if I thought about it some more, I was almost convinced I’d heard his voice when the cold began to stop.
“Kalina,” Raisa said, stepping closer to the bed now that I was lying on my back again, not fighting to get up. Sluggish, but still mostly with it in my mind, I was once more a spectator in my life, not an active player in it.
“It’s me. Raisa.” She sniffled as she watched me. “Your cousin Raisa.”
I didn’t need her to tell me. The family resemblance was there. Her voice, though more mature and older, was hers.
But that didn’t do anything about the fact that she was bred. She was a living example of the hell I faced. She might have been family once. Now, she was one of them. The enemy.
“This is Alexsei.” She gestured to the man as he retreated from the bed. Turning my head to seek him out took too much effort. Already, I was blinking more. Slower. Like my lids were just too heavy to keep open.
“He is a friend. Part of the family.”
If I had the strength, if that needle of drugs wasn’t already coursing a sedative through me, I would’ve shaken my head.
No.
You’re not family anymore.
I have no family.
None.
My parents were dead.
Erik was a monster.
She was an accomplice, willing to be sold and knocked up as a broodmare.
Family?
I had no understanding of that concept anymore. I was alone, forever alone with the lurking threat of a marriage I didn’t want, the warning that I would be forced into being with a man who’d rape me, sell me, or share me.
Despite the earnestly serious expression on her face, I wouldn’t believe her lies.
I didn’t have a family in any traditional sense of that word.
The pigeons were more my kin than anyone else. They taunted me, soaring freely through the world in such a way I could only ever hopelessly dream of.
Not shackled. No expectations to prepare for. No orders to submit and obey.
Family?
A raw laugh bubbled up my throat. If I were dragged back to sleep, to that druggy nothingness that the medicine forced me into, I would’ve broken into a hysterical mess of giggles.
Family? Are you kidding me?
All I’d had were Erik and Yusef. Monsters.
With the most depressing hint of defeat, I closed my eyes and waited for the tears to come. They’d fall at the threat of going back to the hell I’d dared to escape.
My cheeks remained dry. No sobs broke my steady, sleepy breaths.
I was too numb, safe in that locked up compartment in my mind as I tried to shy away from the horrors of life and trauma again.
I’m still not free.
I never will be.