Page 31 of Runaway Queen

It felt like someone had been inside. I looked around. The papers on the surfaces were still as madly disorganized as ever. A real downside to growing up with maids was the lack of functioning cleaning skills. It made it particularly difficult to tell if someone had been through your things or not.

I approached my desk, the paranoia from the woods returning tenfold. Had that really just been my overactive imagination or something else? Someone else.

I sat at my desk, my gaze drifting over my things. It stuttered to a stop when I saw it. A print that hadn’t been there earlier. I picked it up gingerly.

I recognized it a little, though it wasn’t one I was overly familiar with. It wasMadonna of the Swallow, by Carlo Crivelli.

In the print of the famous painting, a swallow perched over the Madonna’s throne. Dropping the print, I pulled up the search bar on my phone and typed in the painting’s name.

I scanned the results, and darkness tugged at the edges of my vision.

“The swallow depicted in the image represents resurrection.”

I set my phone down and stared blindly at my desk. A swallow, representing resurrection?

My lastochka, I’ll always find you, wherever you go,the past whispered in my ear.

Feeling my sandwich threaten to return on me, I put the print of the painting into a drawer and slammed it shut. I couldn’t fall apart right now. I had work to get through, papers to grade, and a professional shiny smile to paste on for at least four more hours.

I could fall apart later, at home, with a bottle of wine, behind locked doors, like a normal person.

12

NIKOLAI

That night, I dressed in clothes that felt more like me than the ones I’d been given, courtesy of Ronan Black, when I got out of jail. Black jeans and a t-shirt, a leather jacket over the top, and steel-capped boots. I dressed slowly and methodically, with a sense of ceremony. It was a special occasion, after all. Tonight, I was done waiting. Tonight, I’d play with my prom queen again, finally. Her time was up.

We’d both been playing Sofia’s game for seven years.

It was my turn. Tonight, I’d finally take it.

Her house was designed for men like me. Isolated, unsecure, and dark. I went in the back where she had no motion-activated lights to blind me. The sliding door to the back garden was locked but slid open easily under my magic touch. Seven years in prison, and I still had the knack, just like riding a bike or hogtying a hostage. Some tricks are never forgotten.

Her house smelled like the sea and the forest, and another hint of something I’d long ago given up hoping to smell.

Her.Sofia.

My shoes were silent as I made my way across the polished wooden floors of her open-plan sitting room. It was a modest house for a millionaire’s daughter, prettily furnished in creams and blues. I made my way up the stairs, my ears straining for the sounds of someone awake.

I felt like I was walking through a dream. Really, hadn’t I been dreaming since that day in the visiting room, when my brother had told me that the only woman I’d ever loved had died? I shouldn’t forget Irina, of course, another woman I’d loved and failed to save.

At the top of the landing, there were several closed doors. I ignored them for the open one at the end of the hall. I could feel her in there. Like that string that had been tied between us when we’d only been kids in a brutal, uncaring world, it had never been severed. She’d carried her end into the afterlife and made me a walking dead man. A body without a heart, existing, but never living. But it had all been a lie. My little prom queen had gotten good at lying, it seemed. She needed to be reminded that we didn’t lie to each other. She could lie to anyone she wanted, but not to me. Never to me.

I prowled down the hall silently, and when I reached the room, the scent of my dreams filled my head.

She was asleep, unmoving in a big white bed, her short dark hair spread out in strands against the pillow. I was at her side before I could stop myself, looking down at the woman who had haunted me nearly my entire life. She was sleeping soundly and showed no sign of waking when I reached out to touch her. I had to touch her to know she was real.

My fingers met the plush velvet of her cheek.

A shock went through me at the contact. A pulse of life, soul-deep. It struck against my bones. The storm inside me quieted for a moment.

I dragged a painful breath through aching lungs. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her.

Sofia De Sanctis. My ghost. My love. My greatest triumph and biggest failure. Her skin was like cream under my fingers. I couldn’t stop running my hand up and down her bare arm. It was dangerous. It might wake her. I didn’t care. Let her wake up to a dead man, dressed in black, with empty eyes, looming over her bed.

She shifted in her sleep, rolling onto her back and throwing her arm over her head. I couldn’t stop staring at her. My hand fell to her face, and then lower, circling her neck. All the times I’d held her right there, her precious pulse fluttering against my palm, flashed through my mind. Now, I needed it more than anything. I needed the visceral proof that this woman was real. Alive. I circled her neck. Her pulse pounded against my hand with reassuring regularity.

I found my hand pressing against that slender column, pinning her to the bed. Warmth crackled across my chest, white-hot, burning my frozen insides. I gasped out a shuddering breath. It felt like the emptiness inside me was on fire, melting my bones and boiling my blood. I pressed more firmly, and she let out a small breath. One of her hands fell to my hand. In her heavy sleep, she pulled ineffectively at my grip.

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