Annika has shut herself off from me ever since I fucked her against the sofa. With my hand around her nape and my cock tearing through her back hole.
That was two days ago.
Two days of constant silence and cold shoulders.
She hasn’t spoken a whole sentence to me since and the best thing I’ve gotten have been monosyllabic replies.
She hasn’t run with me on the beach.
Hasn’t even practiced her sacred ballet.
Hasn’t touched food unless I force her to eat.
Silent treatment.
But this is completely different from when I wouldn’t speak. That was part of my character, but whatever Annika has chosen to practice has nothing to do with her personality.
No one would accuse an annoyingly cheerful person like her of being quiet, but that’s exactly what she’s been the past couple of days.
She’s been slowly but surely falling into a dark tunnel that I can’t reach inside of.
Sighs have become her signature language and a lost gaze has been her standard look.
Every time I’ve tried to talk to her, she turns her face the other way. When I threatened to punish her, she told me to, “Do as you wish.”
Whenever I’ve touched her, she pushes me away and tells me not to put my hands on her anymore.
I’ve been so tempted to fuck her until she screams my name so she knows not to pull this stunt anymore, but something stops me.
The mixture of disgust and indifference on her face.
Lately, it’s veering more toward indifference.
People often say that hate is the most loathsome feeling, but that’s because they’ve never been on the receiving end of apathy.
When the person who holds my world in the palm of her hand acts like I mean nothing.
Like I don’t exist.
At first, I gave her space, tried not to push her too far, and thought she’d eventually come around.
Usually, there’s no way in fuck Annika would stop talking. It’s part of who she is, and the reason she got under my skin in the first place.
But the more time I’ve given her, the deeper she’s withdrawn into herself.
And I need to put an end to it.
I open my eyes with the very intention of doing just that. Today, I’m going to shake the fuck out of her and make her talk, even if I have to resort to drastic methods.
Doesn’t matter what lengths I have to go to in order to get actual sentences out of her.
I trace the spot beside me and freeze when my hand meets cold sheets. My eyes fly open, and sure enough, Annika is nowhere to be seen.
She tried to fight sleeping beside me at the beginning, but I wasn’t having it, so she just lay stiffly beside me. It was either that or I’d sleep curled all around her.
We’ve kept that routine every night. Only, she’s not here now.
I spring up from bed, pull on shorts, and throw on a T-shirt as I scan the room for her. The scent of violets permeates my nostrils, but they’re not as strong or as prominent as when she’s in my arms.
“Annika?” I call and head downstairs to the kitchen, to where she practices ballet in the hall, and then to the small library where she reads sometimes, or more accurately, makes me read to her since she’s lazy to do it herself.
However, there’s no sign of her.
My body tightens and a pungent taste fills the back of my throat. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to…panic.
Even back then, back when my mother hung from the ceiling, and I couldn’t get air to my starved lungs, I didn’t feel panic. I had an otherworldly determination to breathe.
I needed to fucking breathe.
Which was why I crawled and crawled and crawled.
I’m running now, down the street and onto the beach. She’s not there.
Fuck.
She can’t possibly go to the small airport at the other side of the island without a car. And she doesn’t even know where it is in the first place.
Unless…she picked another way to leave.
My blood pumps harder and faster as memories of when she rushed into the ocean during a moment of despertion slam back into me.
No, no…
The clouds condense in the sky turning dark gray in full sync with my mood.
My breathing becomes deeper, less controlled, and absolutely chaotic.
“Annika!” I yell, but my voice is stolen and broken by the vicious wind.
The more I run and call for her, the less the chances of finding her seem to become.
Droplets of rain line the distance before it’s proper pouring. Giant waves crash and shatter on the shore displaying the anger of the ocean. The tropical island is soaked in a second and so am I.
But I don’t stop running, battling the wind, and scanning every nook and cranny.
I’m about to swim into the deadly waves in search of her when I see her.
Annika stands at the top of the rocky shore, arms spread wide and head thrown back. The rain has soaked her black dress, a color she’s been wearing the past two days, and has glued it to her petite frame that’s being swayed by the wind.
I storm in her direction, pumped by the worst-case scenarios that play in my head. For a second, as she sways violently, I think the wind will steal her away before I reach her.
That she will fall and drown, and I’ll lose her for good.
You’ve already lost her. You just refuse to admit it, a bloody bastard who lives in my brain says, but I shut him out with plans to murder him later.
The moment I’m about two meters behind her, she turns around abruptly.
Streaks of her hair stick to her pasty pale neck, her cheeks are colorless, her lips are nude, and her eyes are so dim, I’d kill someone if it meant splashing color into them.
Including myself.
The rain soaks her, coming down so hard that she’s almost blurry.
“What are you doing here?” I take a step forward and she takes a step back.
Toward the fucking edge.
I do it again and she does the same, her eyes never leaving mine.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I strain, the words nearly ripping my vocal cords on their way out.
She says nothing, and I have to inhale and exhale a few times to keep from reaching out and choking the fuck out of her.
“Whatever it is you’re upset about, we can talk about it.” I soften my voice—as much as I’m able to soften it under the circumstances. “Just come here, little purple.”
Her lips tremble and a flash of light rises in the depths of her eyes before it’s pushed right down.
She shakes her head.
“I swear to fuck, Annika—” I cut myself off and release a long breath, summoning patience I don’t feel. “What do you want?”
“I want to go home,” she says easily, assertively. The first sentence she’s spoken in days is dedicated to her fucking parents.
“Anything but that.”
She takes another step back. This time, her eyes are so lifeless, she looks like she’s in a casket.
“Annika, stop!”
“You stop!” she yells back. “I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired of this, of you. You’re not the Creighton I know. You’re not the Creighton who made me feel safe and loved, you’re not the Creighton who gave me the courage to go after what I loved. Creighton would never hurt me like this, he wouldn’t rip my heart open over and over again no matter how much I beg him to stop. It’s like I’m stuck with an imposter and I hate it. I hate it so much.”
I grind my back teeth together and my jaw clenches so hard that I’m surprised no tendons are snapped.
“Is that why you refuse to talk to me or let me touch you? Because you think I’m an imposter?”
She nods.
I can hear the shattering sound of my world splintering to pieces. Pieces so small, I will never be able to find them, let alone mend them together again.
When I first brought Annika to this island, I thought we’d find what we once had. Yes, she fought me a little, but she also laughed and fooled around. She danced for me, flirted, and sighed contently in my arms. She loved laying her head on my lap and looking at my face when I read for her and then demanded more.
It felt as if she still loved me.
When she apologized for shooting me, I believed her.
I believed that she had to make a choice, but the bitter truth is that she’ll never choose me over her family.
It’s probably unfair for me to make her do that, but I wanted her to pick me like she picked her brother that time.
I wanted it to be me.
I just never thought that my fixation and my plan to bring us close would push us further apart. I never thought I’d rob her of light and leave her as this broken person.
She looks nothing like my Annika.
There’s no trace of her cheerfulness, the constant mischievousness and innocence in her eyes, or the energy that bubbles from her pores.
She might have physically shot me, but I killed her.
And there’s only one way to bring her back to life.
Even if it means sacrificing my own in return.
“Okay,” I whisper.
Her brows crease. “Okay?”
“I’ll take you home.”
“You…you will?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
She shakes her head frantically, some of the light seeping back to her eyes. Slowly but steadily.
Fuck.
The knowledge that I nearly broke her spirit makes me want to shoot myself and, this time, never wake up.
That would be better than hearing the sound of my crumbling insides or witnessing her live without me.
It’d fucking rip me apart.
“Now, come down from the edge.” I offer her my hand, but she stares at it suspiciously.
We remain like that for a moment, her gaze sliding from my face to my hand and back again.
“Annika.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s raining.”
“I know.”
“Dance with me.”
Her eyes widen, the blue and gray clashing for dominance. Despite her constant nagging about her hair and clothes, Annika loves when we dance in the rain. It brings out memories of our first date and kiss. Of the time I decided she’d become mine for good.
Her chin trembles and so does her voice. “But you don’t dance.”
“I do with you.”
“I don’t like the rain.”
“You do for me.” This time when I nod at my extended hand, she takes it.
I tug her so forcibly that she lands against my chest and her small palms fall on my shoulders. My hand grabs onto her waist and we sway slowly to the sound of the rain.
We’re pressed against one another so closely that I want to stop time right at this moment. Lately, whenever we’re this close, she pushes back or tries to put as much distance between us as possible.
But right now, she stares up at me with expectant eyes, eyes so full of light, I want to kick myself and throw my body into a ditch for ever tainting her with my darkness.
These eyes are only meant for light.
We continue swaying slowly, gently, and she doesn’t stop staring at me. Whenever the rain gets in her eyes, she blinks it away to watch me closely, as if wanting to peel open my exterior and peek inside me.
“Does this mean you’ll forget about the past?” she murmurs hopefully, expectantly.
And I hate to crush that hope, or decimate it, but that’s exactly what I have to do to give her a new beginning.
One where I’m not tarnishing her life.
I was always meant to break Annika Volkov. I just didn’t know I’d be the one broken instead.
“I can’t erase my past.”
Her feet come to a halt as everything shakes—her chin, her body, her lips. “What about your present and future?”
“I’ve already lost those.”
“That’s not—”
Her words are cut off when a commotion erupts on other end of the beach.
I frown.
No one is supposed to be here. This island is owned by Grandpa Jonathan and only he and Dad use it whenever they need a holiday. But they wouldn’t come over, considering they both know I’m here.
Unless they decided to come uninvited. Maybe Mum and Nan pressured them into bringing them here to see me?
No.
Something is wrong about this.
“Stay here,” I tell Annika and start to take the road down.
When I turn around to make sure she didn’t go back to the rocky shore, I find her hot on my heels.
“What?” she asks. “I want to know what’s going on.”
It’s useless to try to stop her and we don’t have time anyway. The rain has stopped as abruptly as it started by the time we reach the beach.
Several men in black patrol the whole area like some special agent soldiers.
I don’t hear footsteps, but I hear Annika’s shriek as I’m hit from behind.
Pain explodes in the back of my neck and I fall to my knees. My wrists are wrung behind my back as a Russian-accented voice mutters, “Got him, Boss.”
When I lift my head, I find none other than the man who murdered my childhood and bathed in its blood.
The man who gave Annika life.
Adrian Volkov.
And he’s holding a gun to my temple.
