Page 14 of Emperor of Wrath

I’ve trapped her.

So why the fuck do I feel like the one who’s been caught?

3

ANNIKA

The second I walk into the hospital room, Freya launches herself into my arms.

“Fuck,” she sobs against my chest.

Really, what else is there to say?

Over her shoulder, my eyes land on Damian, lying motionless in the hospital bed. I hate the grotesque plastic tube snaking out of his slack mouth. I hate the machines breathing and pumping his blood for him. I hate the wires and the rhythmic beeping sounds, and the bleachy hospital smell of antiseptic and death.

I hate all of it. But mostly, I hate that I still don’t know if I’m about to lose a family member.

I was eighteen when I lost everything. The daughter of a Serbian mafia kingpin and his American wife, I’d already been married off to another crime lord who hated me and the forced marriage as much as I hated him for the same reason.

Right after the wedding, a mafia war broke out and his family was annihilated in an attack on their home. I managed to escape, and one of my father’s men, Ruslan, managed to get me home.

But it was too late.

The war had been there first, taking my whole family as well and burning our home to the ground. Ruslan got me as far as Greece before he died from the wounds sustained in the attack on our family. That’s the day I lost all that I’d ever known.

I’d lived my entire life as a pampered mafia princess, wanting for nothing. But when it’s steal or starve to death because you don’t have that wealth anymore, the world of black and white becomes a lot grayer.

I stole because I had to. I stole because I had nothing to eat. I met other people like me—kids and teenagers who lived on the streets of Athens. There were girls like me who found…other ways…to keep themselves fed and from dying in a gutter.

I almost did it once myself. I was starving, I was sleeping in an alley, and I had an infected cut that was getting gross.

It was just sex, I rationalized. Insert tab A into slot B. Repeat. Get paid. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

I cleaned myself up as best I could and walked around the square in the seedy section of town with the other girls looking for work. I said yes to the first man who walked up to me with an evil, lustful look on his face, and quoted him the same price I’d heard a girl say to her client ten minutes before.

He brought me to his car. Before anything happened, he opened the back door, punched me in the face, then threw me in.

There are moments in your life that define how the rest of it will play out. That was mine.

I could have let it go. I already had the money, since I saw all the other girls getting paid up front. When he shuffled into the backseat after me and climbed on top of me, I could have just…tuned out.

But while I may have been born into this world a princess, it wasn’t without fire and fury in my veins.

So I fought.

I slammed my forehead over and over into his face as he pawed at me, until I heard the crunch of broken bone and his screams of pain. Until I felt the hot drip of blood. When he rolled off me, I kicked him as hard as I could in the balls, over and over, until he threw up and screamed for mercy.

Then I ran and never looked back.

And that was the day I decided I would take from this world what I needed and give nothing in return.

I spent the next few years completely on my own. I ignored the world and those around me, took what I needed, and survived.

But then one day, in Milan, I saw something I couldn’t ignore. Two teenaged boys were dragging a screaming, clawing young girl out from the makeshift tarp shelter she’d set up in the crumbling wreckage of a condemned building. It was obvious they were trying to rip her clothes off, probably to rape her or something heinous. But that’s not the only reason the girl was screaming.

It took me a second to realize she was afraid of the sunlight.

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