Page 183 of Dance of Deception

“Thenwhy—” My voice splinters.

“He had a way of making you believe he was the only thing keeping you safe.” Vera exhales sharply, her shoulders curling inward, shrinking in on herself. “Even when he was the one destroying you.” She shakes her head. “You don’t understand what it was like to be trapped in his world. To be in too deep to claw your way out. I should've fought harder. But?—”

Her voice cuts off, her jaw tightening. Then she takes a deep, shaky breath and lifts her chin. “She had you right there, in that corner,” Vera murmurs, nodding toward the shadows in the back of the room. “She lasted two weeks. Long enough to hold you. Long enough for a photo. And then… She died.”

I can’t breathe.

“She never got to leave this place,” Vera whispers, her voice distant, lost somewhere I can’t reach. “But I raised you like you were mine. I did my best.”

“Yes, you raised her like a daughter. But you never tried to get her out,” Carmine snarls. “You never tried to change her situation.”

Vera’s face twists, fury flashing in her eyes.

“I DID TRY!” she screams, her voice fracturing, breaking apart. “You don’t know what I went through! What I had to do tosurvive him!”

The last word rip out of her like a dying breath.

“Itried!” she chokes. “I?—”

The lights flicker. Then suddenly, the whole room is plunged into total darkness.

“Fucking breakers,” Vera mutters bitterly. Her phone flashlight illuminates the floor and her own feet as she stands. She stomps across the room, the phone light swinging up to a circuit breaker box set into the concrete wall. She opens it, flips a heavy switch, and the lights flicker back on with a buzzing sound.

"She did try to help you, Lyra."

The voice is like a knife driving slowly into my throat. Like cold steel slicing over my skin, flaying me open as I drown in my own screams and blood.

That voice shouldn’t exist outside of my nightmares. The man it belongs to isdead. Cremated. His ashes thrown down a sewer.

The whole world goes numb and cold as slowly, like in a dream or underwater, I start to swivel my head around.

"She left the door open for you that day.”

Suddenly, I’m looking the Devil himself in the eye.

His lips curl into a dark, predatory smile.

“Good to see you again,moya dorogaya doch’,” my father growls quietly.

41

CARMINE

The room goes totally silent,like the haunted silence of a graveyard at midnight, or in the aftermath of a gunshot.

Lyra's eyes are wide, her body rigid, catatonic. Vera looks like she’s staring death in the face.

I could wonder about the fact that we’re all staring at and talking to an impossibility. But there’s no time for that. Instead, I take it all in, blood still trickling from my temple, my mind racing to see any possible way out.

Arkadi takes a slow step forward, scanning the room like a king surveying his realm. His dark hair, now silvered in places, is longer than it was in the last photos taken of him in prison. His face is more lined and worn.

I remember this motherfucker’s trial and the women that flocked to him, both online or outside the courtroom. As if he was some sort of heartthrob celebrity and not a monster who would rape and kill those women’s own daughters without thinking twice.

But those charming looks of his are fading. He’s grown older, haggard.

More monstrous.

His gaze drifts to Vera, his lips curling in disgust. “You let her see,” he murmurs, his voice full of hatred. “My demons are for me and me alone to bear,” Arkadi growls. “But you—you had theaudacityto allow my own daughter to see?—”

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