Page 60 of Dance with Death

Just do it now!

I dig the tip into my skin.

The door crashes against the wall as it’s flung open wide.

I turn my head to look, pulling an unintentional, shallow stripe across my neck with the blade, hardly nicking the surface as Vigo bursts into the room.

“Did you think no one heard you break the fucking mirror?” He points his finger at the wall right beside the mirror. “Renata’s on the other side of that wall, you stupid girl.”

He marches across the room and hovers over me before I can decide how to react. It’s not instinct to kill oneself, so I don’t have the impulse to quickly slice my throat open before he reaches me—though I wish I had. Instead, I waver, frozen, waiting stupidly until he decides for me. He bends and frees me from the ankle cuff. He snatches my wrist, twisting and yanking me upright, forcing me to drop the shard as he pulls me to my feet.

“You really should have been quicker about it, baby doll. Now you’ve given me something to look forward to.”

My mind is so muddled, confused by the swift change of events. “What?”

“Your punishment.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He’s right.

I should’ve been faster.

I shouldn’t have hesitated.

I should’ve been braver, stronger, more determined in choosing my fate. Because now another fate was going to be chosen for me.

I plant my bare feet as he yanks back on my arms. He manages to drag me out into the hallway. “Just let medie, Vigo. Let me do it, let me go!”

His grip slips from my wrist, the blood he’s smeared around creating a thin, slippery coating. Free from his grasp, I spin, ready to run back into the room, grab that piece of glass, and finish what I started before he can catch me, but when I turn, I slam hard into a solid brick wall of a man who catches me with both hands on my waist.

Nikolai.

Nikolai?

I look up to meet his cold, gray eyes and they regard me with curiosity, concern, and the same familiar hunger that was always there from the beginning.

His eyes lower, surely observing the blood that’s now dripping down my chest, staining the top of the fabric of my gown.

His voice is eerily quiet when he speaks. “What did you do,rabynya?

Chapter 16

Ezra

My blue-eyed girlis fractured, splintered right down the middle from the untold horrors of her servitude to Vigo.

I don’t see her at first, but I hear her voice. I hear her yell, “Just let medie, Vigo!” and the words rebound painfully around my skull.

Our timing is somehow perfect to run into them and witness this moment. Nikolai was bringing me back to the room to shackle me in for the night before heading off to the boardroom. I was coming down the hall behind him when Vigo tore from his room just in front of us, dragging out a girl in a flash of gold.

The flash of gold was Anya in the gown she’d worn at the reception.

“Just let me die, Vigo!”

My adrenaline spiked, muscles twitching, everything within my veins pounding with the message to grab her, run with her,saveher.

But I’ve learned that my adrenaline doesn’t have the privilege of conscious thought. It doesn’t understand that I can grab her, I can run with her, but I don’t have a way tosaveher.

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