Page 46 of Bratva Butcher

“That bad, huh?”

“Yes and no,”she smiled.“In truth, I’m here because there’s something you won’t admit to yourself. Something you refuse to acknowledge. Something you’re keeping so deeply buried that your subconscious has decided it needs to step in and make you open your eyes.”

I frowned. “That is…absolutely absurd.”

“The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, Dima.”

I sucked in a sharp, painful breath. Nobody had called me that in ten years.

“We still don’t entirely understand it, or what it’s capable of, despite centuries of research. How else do you explain me standing here in front of you?”

Simple.

“I’ve. Gone. Insane,” I enunciated slowly.

She laughed again. Shivers danced down my spine. If it wasn’t for that ethereal glow surrounding her, I could have sworn she was right there with me.

“Maybe you have. Maybe you haven’t. I suppose we’ll never really know, will we?”

My dead wife standing in front of me having a conversation with me was all the proof I needed.

Despite knowing the harsh truth—that she wasn’t truly there, that she was nothing more than a figment of my imagination—my heart still pounded in my chest at the sight of her.

Who cared if she wasn’t real? I could see her. I could talk to her. I didn’t care that she was clearly a hallucination from my crazy, deranged mind.

Seeing her, delusion or not, was better than not seeing her at all. I would happily take any moment in her presence, even if it meant I had to give myself a concussion every time to achieve it.

She gave me a small smile, eyes sparkling with sadness.

“I’m not her. Not really.”

I knew that, and I didn’t give a fuck.

“Besides, the moment you finally acknowledge what you’re trying so desperately to avoid, I’ll disappear, and you’ll finally be able to move on.”

Anger and panic lashed through me, rocketing me to my feet. “I willnevermove on,” I snarled.

“Okay, that’s it!” Autumn screeched, flinging herself up in her cot. My gaze darted to her at her outburst. When I moved them back to where Yekaterina had been standing, there was nothing there but empty air.

She was gone.

“You must be unaware, so let me give you a quick lesson in prisoner etiquette 101.” Autumn had a hell of a lot of nerve talking tomeabout prisoner etiquette. Bitch never shut the fuck up. “When you’re stuck in a room with a bunch of other people who are all trying to sleep, keep your fucking trap shut,” she hissed. Her green eyes were on fire, her red hair in a big tangled mess, sticking up haphazardly in every direction. The image of Doc Brown fromBack to the Futureflashed through my mind. The resemblance was so close, I barely managed to hold back my snicker.

Without saying another word—or giving me a chance to say a word back, for that matter—she laid back down with a growl, her back to me, and flung the blanket over her head so she was completely hidden underneath it.

And that was it.

There was no mention of the fact that I’d been talking to myself. No odd or weird looks. Absolutely nothing to indicate what she’d just witnessed was strange or out of the ordinary.

I glanced around the cell one final time, hoping to catch just one more glimpse, one more second of my Yekaterina, but she didn’t return.

Chapter Seventeen

Dimitri Volkov

The next few daysconsisted of the same bullshit. Eat, sleep, train. Eat, sleep, train. It all became extremely repetitive. Tension between all the prisoners grew thicker and thicker with each passing day. Any day, the games would begin, and people would start to die. That kind of atmosphere put a bit of a stigma on things. Made it hard to unwind.

Yekaterina hadn’t returned, and for the first time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to.

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