Page 166 of Ivory Ashes

VIVIANA

The world around me is darkness.

No light, no shadows. There’s no variation in the absolute blackness around me.

I try to lift my hand in front of my face, but my arms are heavy. My limbs are sluggish and cold. I look down, but I can’t see my own body.

“Help!” My voice is a dry rasp, paper-thin and weak.

Pain sparks in my joints with every movement. It radiates behind my eyeballs and I groan.

A sound echoes and builds. Builds. Builds.

Soon, the floor is vibrating. My teeth rattle as the hard floor at my back splinters and cracks open. A faint light creeps from inside the crack, just enough that I can see a hand reaching for me.

I twist away from the fingers inching towards me, but I can’t move. My legs are lifeless and my arms flop across my chest like bags of wet sand.

“Mikhail!” I don’t mean to cry for him, but I can’t help it. It’s instinctual. “Mikhail, help me!”

More hands protrude through the ground and claw at me. Shattered nails leave long gouges in my skin that weep blood.

This is it, I think. This is how I die.

One more hand, cold as the grave, erupts next to my head and clamps down over my mouth and nose.

I sit up, gasping.

The room around me spins and I have to work to blink it back into focus. Not that there’s much to focus on. It’s a bland room—concrete floors, white walls, a metal door.

I stare down at my body, relieved to see I’m not covered in claw marks. That nightmare, at least, isn’t true. Though I’m pretty sure I’ve woken up from one nightmare just to find myself in an even worse one.

I drop my face into my ice-cold fingers and try to remember what happened.

It’s a blur of blood and fear. Especially since I’m ninety-eight percent positive I was drugged. It would explain the small red pinprick on my right bicep. Someone injected me with something.

I have to forage through my scrambled head for every thought, but all at once, my head is clear. All of my energy funnels into the only thing that matters.

“Dante!”

I know he isn’t here with me, but that doesn’t stop me from spinning around and checking the floor around me. It’s the same way I used to wake up in the middle of the night when he was only a baby, patting the blankets around me like maybe I lost him between the sheets. He was always in his bedroom safe and sound in his crib.

But this time, that thought isn’t a comfort. We aren’t in our little apartment in the city. Dante isn’t safe and sound in his crib.

We’re in a waking nightmare and I have no clue where my baby is.

I crawl to my feet and lunge for the metal door. I don’t even make it a foot before my body is jerked painfully back.

My tailbone cracks against the cement, the wind whooshing out of me.

That’s when I hear the rattling of chains. That’s when I feel the frigid metal wrapped around my wrists and ankles. My skin is already so cold I didn’t notice it before.

“Hello!” I scream, not even stopping to think if it’s a good idea.

I have no idea who is on the other side of this room. But if there’s even a tiny sliver of a chance that it’s my son, I’m going to scream with everything I have.

“Hello!” My dry throat aches, but I yell as loud as I can. “Who’s there? Help me!”

A key slides into the door. Metal tumblers click and turn painfully slowly, giving me too much time to imagine who might be on the other side.

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