Cool fingers grip my face, yanking me out of my doze. “Wake up.”
Groaning, I try and slap away the hand. My head aches. My whole damn body aches.
I just need to sleep.
My arm is caught, and I try and tug it free.
“Anastasia.”
The snapped sound of my name drags me back into wakefulness, and my eyes slide open. A pair of green eyes swim into view. “You might have a concussion.”
I don’t have a concussion. I just need to rest my eyes. Turning away, I bury my face into the warm material. When it pulls away, I finally open my eyes properly.
Kit stares down at me, his violet eyes devoid of emotion. “Please remove your face from my jacket.”
My face burns with mortification as I pull it back, and I glance around. Night has fallen, and I wonder how long they actually let me sleep before waking me up. The city is a few hours away from Oakbourne.
“We’ll be there in five minutes.”
I turn to Rafe, but he’s staring out of the window.
It feels strange, to be back between them again. I never knew that something so familiar, as familiar to me as breathing, could feel so… unsettled.
Broken.
And yet here we are. The men on either side of me both turn away, leaving me to my own thoughts as I try to scrape them back together around the pulsing headache at the back of my skull.
Maybe I do have a concussion. I’m struggling to process today’s events, to wrap my head around the fact that I’m back with the Tate brothers. That they’re taking me back to Oakbourne Manor, a house I haven’t set foot in for nine years.
But where I’ll apparently be spending the next twenty… as a servant.
My breathing starts to speed up. Don’t think about it.
I can’t think about how much of my life has been taken from me today. How much Ella has stolen from me, on top of the years she’s already had.
I wonder how much more these three men could possibly take, without there being nothing left of me at all.
And how long it will be before I find out.
When the car rolls to a stop and Kit and Rafe finally look down at me, the shaking in my fingers has softened to a tremor. I ball my hands into fists, waiting.
The car door opens, and Silas appears, his broad shoulders filling the doorway easily as he ducks down to meet my eyes. “Time to meet your sentence, Anastasia Cooper.”
There’s disgust in his voice, even as his large hands wrap around my waist, lifting me down from the car. He steps back as I look up at the familiar view. It hasn’t changed.
I almost expect William to come charging out, bouncing and grinning.
My mouth feels dry. I didn’t even think about their father. “Is… is he here? William?”
The tension around me ratchets up tenfold. Silas grips my shoulder, leaning into my face.
“Don’t you ever,” he snarls, “say his name in my presence again. You don’t even get to think about him. Do you understand?”
I blink. “I—,”
He shakes me, the movement making my already aching head throb more. “No, he’s not fucking here. And if you want someone to blame, try looking in the fucking mirror.”
I flinch back, away from the tight grip of his hands and the hate in his eyes, and Silas drops me as though my skin is on fire. He turns and walks away from me, rapid footsteps towards the lights of the house.
“Sort her out,” he snaps over his shoulder as he pushes the door open and disappears inside.
Slowly, I reach up my hand as best I can to try and massage the aching flesh. There’s nothing I can do for the hurt inside my chest, though.
“What did he mean?” I whisper, turning to Kit. Then to Rafe. Both of them wear identical harsh expressions, never more alike than they seem to be right now, in their renewed dislike for me. As though I’ve reminded them of something. “What… what happened?”
Rafe’s jaw tightens, his mouth forming a firm line. “The fuck did Silas just say?”
I look between them. Both of them look determined to blame me for something, but I have no idea what.
Unless it’s for what happened the night I left. But something about William, specifically, has triggered them.
As… as though he’s not here anymore.
My heart hurts even more at the thought. I don’t protest when Rafe grabs my arm, dragging me after Silas. I try to keep up, Kit falling in behind us as he pulls me roughly up the steps, shoving the door open with one hand and pushing me through with the other.
The entrance hall hasn’t changed at all. Small sets of stairs around us lead off to various places. William’s study. The longer hall ahead of us, leading upstairs. Another set to our left would take us down to the kitchen.
The room is still the same dark green, full of artwork and vases filled with fresh flowers from the fields around us. I wonder who keeps them filled. I can’t imagine Silas, Kit or Rafe picking daisies.
We both come to a stop. The woman waiting inside the hall isn’t someone I know. Short and gray-haired, she eyes Rafe with the expression of a mildly displeased headmistress.
“Ellen,” Rafe acknowledges. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
Her pale-blue eyes move to mine. “I was up anyway. It’s no bother. This is her?”
Her expression is carefully neutral, but I catch a flicker of distaste in her eyes before she blinks it away. When Rafe doesn’t respond, she nods. “I’ve prepared you a room.”
She speaks directly to me, and I nearly close my eyes in relief at the thought of a bed. But Rafe’s grip tightens. “She doesn’t need a room.”
We both turn to him, and even Ellen looks a little taken aback. “Why not?”
“Because,” he says grimly, “she’s not here for a holiday.”
He pulls me past a gaping Ellen, yanking open the door to the kitchen and pulling me down the small flight of stairs. I barely have chance to glance around before he’s pushing me towards the hearth. “This is appropriate, don’t you think? Since it’s where you made your sister sleep. An eye for an eye, and all that.”
I stare at the filthy stone floor. My eyes start to prickle, and I blink them back. “It wasn’t like that.”
“As though I would believe a word that comes from your lying lips,” he says, almost softly. “Enjoy your accommodations, Anastasia. Ellen will wake you in the morning. Early.”
My eyes drop to my hands. To the chains. To the filth beneath my fingernails. The dirt caking my skin. “Wait – Rafe, please—,”
But he’s already jumped up the stairs, the door slamming closed behind him. I’m left with the smoldering remains of the hearth, glowing embers that fade the longer I stare into them.
When they start to swim, I blink. Moisture drips onto my cheek.
“Stop it,” I whisper. “Pull yourself together, Stasi.”
I need running water. And a bathroom. One more urgently than the other.
Thankfully, there’s a small washroom at the other end of the kitchen. It was used by the staff when they came in from the gardens… before. I make my way over to it, praying it hasn’t changed, and sigh with relief when I find it exactly the same as I remember.
Everything seems unchanged. As though I only stepped out of the front door yesterday, and not a decade ago. The art on the walls is the same. The little hooks on the back of the bathroom door are unchanged. Even the towels seem familiar, if not a little more worn.
Switching on the light, I brace myself before looking in the tiny circular mirror.
I didn’t brace enough.
I don’t recognize myself at all. My face looks gaunt, the skin stretched over my cheekbones, so sharp they could cut glass. And my eyes. Dull, sunken, the circles beneath a deep, dark purple. My lips look chapped and blistered, worn away from worrying at them with my teeth.
And my hair… I’ll be lucky to save any of it. My fingers prod uselessly at the nest.
“It doesn’t matter,” I mutter to myself. “It’s just hair.”
But my voice breaks anyway.
Swallowing hard, I glance down at the faucet. At least I have access to warm water. Better than nothing.
I spend a good hour scrubbing myself as best I can in the small space, working around the restrictions of the chains to try and get as much of the dirt off as possible.
I’d kill for a fucking toothbrush. They’ll have to give me one eventually. I hope. I can only imagine what my breath smells like right now.
When I finally wander back into the kitchen, damp and shivering but a little cleaner than I was, it’s a relief to stand next to the hearth. I take in the solid floor with a grimace. The exhaustion is starting to weigh heavily on my shoulders, the pounding pain in my head getting worse.
I have to sleep, or my body is going to force the issue. So I settle myself down with a groan, wriggling to try and find anything like a softer part of the gray stone beneath me and failing miserably.
Rolling onto my back, I blow out a breath and stare at the ceiling. There’s a small blotch directly above me that looks remarkably like a cat.
It’s weirdly reassuring. Like I’m not quite as alone as I currently feel.
“It could be worse, right?” I say to it out loud. “I could be dead.”
Although… I’m not one hundred per cent convinced that this is the better option. Not when I have no idea what Silas, Kit and Rafe have in store for me.
But that’s definitely a tomorrow problem.
