Page 2 of Vicious Games

What the hell had happened to me?

What had I done?

I placed my hands over my face. Think. I had to think. I had no complete memory of the last twenty-four hours, just flashes of color and unknown faces. Fear. I remembered feeling afraid and confused. Then nothing. As if someone had wiped my mind blank. What if it wasn’t that I couldn’t remember but that my mind didn’t want me to remember? I’d read about the mind protecting itself from traumatic memories by refusing to recall them.

What had I done?

I stared at the wrinkled and bloodied wedding dress. It seemed oddly familiar, and yet I couldn’t imagine why. I’d think I would remember willingly wearing a freaking Victorian wedding gown.

Think!

Nothing was going to come to me kneeling on the floor. I needed to get out of this awful dress and wash the blood off. Maybe then it would all come back to me. I ran my hands over my upper arms as a shiver racked my body. That was, if I wanted to remember.

I wrapped my left hand around a drawer handle and used it to pull myself upright. I then searched the other drawers for a pair of scissors. My only option was to somehow cut my way out of the dress. I found a pair of large, lethal-looking silver shears.

Just as I was about to thrust the opened blades between my breasts to cut the silk corset, I heard a sound behind me.

I turned, gripping the shears like a weapon and raising them high.

Roman stood in the doorway. His chest was bare. He was holding what looked like a wadded-up white dress shirt soaked in blood over his shoulder.

I gasped. “What happened?”

His eyes narrowed. “You shot me. And on our wedding day, no less.”

CHAPTER 2

AURORA

Several weeks earlier

My fingertips caressed the piano keys. I could feel the energy from the hundreds of musicians who had come before me radiating from their smoothness.

Sometime ago, Roman had rescued my ugly zebra piano from my parents’ house. We came home from dinner one night and it was just sitting there in the living room. Even now I was surprised by how affected I was by its presence. Roman had never asked me to move in with him. He had simply taken away my home and all other options. My one attempt to escape from under his control before it was too late had ended in disaster. Even after he had dragged me back to his home, or his lair as I privately thought of it, I still hadn’t considered it my new home.

Not until my ugly zebra piano had arrived.

I knew at that moment, it was too late.

Buying me new clothes and expensive jewelry while making me warm his bed at night did not mean I lived in his home. Moving my piano there did. I could no longer secretly deny I lived there when the one possession I cared about most in the world was sitting in the living room.

Then, a few days ago, after that infamous masquerade ball at his brother’s estate, my piano disappeared. At first, I figured Roman was punishing me for my moment of madness.

I doubted I would have actually jumped off the balcony.

At least, I didn’t think I would have.

I wasn’t sure.

I knew that night haunted Roman. I often caught him staring at me with a mixture of fear and wariness… and anger. The anger was definitely there, simmering under the surface like a banked but not fully extinguished fire, which was why I had assumed he had taken my piano to punish me. I found it later that day, placed in the library’s corner.

Today, I learned why. Roman had purchased a fully restored one-hundred-twenty-year-old Victorian Steinway & Sons concert grand piano for me. It was an exorbitant gift. Again, I ran my fingers over the keys. They were warm to the touch, the ivory seeming to have absorbed the feel of all those talented musicians who had come before me. I let out the breath I had been holding.

This gift was too much.

Fancy expensive dinners were fleeting.

Couture clothes meant nothing to me.

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