Page 1 of Inside the Wicked

CHAPTER 1

Anastasia

Ninety-three days have passed without Rhett. I wear the scars of each one on my heart, wondering if the days will ever pass without cutting.

I sit across from Alistair Lanshall in his musty old office. The man who took everything from me. He looks at me from his tall seat by the fireplace as if I’m his weapon in the making, not knowing my sharpening edge will take his blood when it’s time. I have the patience to get it right. If I were to cut off the head of the network by killing Alistair, it would only grow another.

He never took my red serpent earrings from me. More than three months with Alistair Lanshall and he never once questioned them. It’s my secret triumph, the only color I wear now. And the King of the Vipers remains oblivious to the serpent in his den. At the end of the war, it doesn’t matter that those around me have fangs primed with venom, only who has the cunning to strike first.

“You’ve been excelling, Anastasia,” Alistair praises, lighting a cigar.

He sits in the wingback armchair opposite me as we both lose ourselves to the fire blazing in the hearth of his elaborate office. It’s nearly summer, but it’s as if this mansion refuses tohold heat, and I often think it’s the lingering death clinging to the dark corners of every room that causes its chill. I know this space all too well as Alistair has taken my training on personally—apparently something he hasn’t done since Rhett Kaiser.

I thought over time the loss of him might be easier to face. Yet time is cruel, taunting. The present can be distracted, but the future will always be without Rhett, and every time I remember that fact my heart breaks with a new crack. Grief never silences; it’s ever-present. A slow kind of death until we get to join the lost. My heart became cold to everyone and my mind is focused on my task: to learn everything I can about Alistair Lanshall and ruin him in the wreckage I plan to make of his empire.

My hand runs down Shadow’s fur as I say, “I’ll be graduating soon, then I’ll have more time.”

He allowed me to continue my PHD and live my own life for show. My station and access are invaluable to him now my father is President, residing in the White House.

I got my own apartment despite my father’s protests. After everything that happened with the Forbes, his security detail around me became insufferable, but it didn’t take long for Alistair to kill off the agents assigned to me and have his own resume their identities. Their deaths will forever linger on my conscience.

I tried to find out if Alistair could be tricking me. If Rhett could still be alive and somehow being kept from me. Every day where I turn up nothing darkens my despair. Every week dissolves more of my denial. Every month sinks me deeper and deeper into my depression.

He isn’t coming back.

“Excellent. It’s time to see you work for everything you’ve been training toward. I need you to start earning back what I’ve spent on you.”

He doesn’t just mean money. Alistair values his time and effort, and in exchange I will perform for him. My only condition was that I wouldn’t sell my body to these monsters, and to my relief, he wholeheartedly agreed. He’s a possessive man even if he doesn’t have eyes for me that way. He doesn’t like people touching what’s his.

I’ve learned how to use a gun properly, precisely. I still have a lot of training to go, but I can lift, aim, and shoot without a single tremble of fear now. He’s taught me how to be a master manipulator and seductress—something he’s told me many times I’m born for, what with how quickly I’ve adopted the patterns of the women in the clubs he’s taken me to for the sole purpose of witnessing them at work.

Every day I’m not in university or with my parents for events, I’m here, with him. My best friend Riley is often concerned for me, but I told her I got a job working at some higher law firm that will go toward extra credits, and that I need the distraction.

Both my parents and Riley notice the change in me. They walk on glass around me as if they’re waiting for me to get over my grief. I won’t. And I’m playing a very dangerous game with Alistair Lanshall that I’m not certain I’ll walk away from.

I’m doing it all for Rhett.

“Good. It’s been getting rather dull around here,” I say.

Alistair smiles sinfully, tipping his head back to observe me silently. He’ll occasionally get affectionate and touch me, but to my relief, it’s always the touch of someone admiring their prized work rather than the product of lust. I never would have stayed if that was his goal with me.

“Darkness has most certainly become you, and it has been utterly breathtaking to watch the potential I saw in you come out to play.”

Alistair thinks he made me, but that’s only his delusional arrogance.

“I want to take you with me on a job tomorrow,” he says. It’s not a request.

“I have dinner with my parents.”

“I’m sure you can reschedule.”

I have done so many times that I’m beginning to feel guilty. They hardly see me now. But if my plans involved something public, Alistair would let me attend. He wants my reputation in the press to be stellar, and I often wonder if it’s for his own twisted satisfaction. He’ll spend far too long marveling over the papers with me, my image poised and proper. I’ve been painted as America’s broken-hearted sweetheart, and only he knows my darkness—the darkness he thinks he planted and harvested. He thinks I’m a puppet under his hand that the world is oblivious to.

“I have class in an hour.” I sigh, pushing myself up. “I’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Time is precious. Graduation can’t come soon enough with this nonsense draining so much of it.”

I don’t respond, leaving his dark and ominous study. Though I’ve never been attached to my postgrad English literature degree, it has opened doors of future potential, but I can’t deny I somewhat agree with Alistair now.

---