Page 20 of Wicked Vow

I fling myself down on the bed, not bothering to undress or pull down the covers, staring up at the ceiling. I feel as if I’m going insane, and I don’t know how to reconcile any of it.

Where the fuck am I supposed to go from here?

When exhaustion finally overcomes me, my dreams are just as tangled.

I dream of the day that picture was taken, when I’d gone with Mika and her son to have a picnic. I dream of her laughter, leaning over the basket as she’d unpacked the food, setting it out on the wide blanket as Gregor had run in circles in the grass, his boyish laughter mingling with hers.

I’d so rarely felt true happiness in my life, but I’d felt it then. When I did feel it, it was always with them, though I hardly saw them. There was no danger in loving them, I’d always thought, no reason not to adore the only family I had. My sister was sweet and true, and my nephew was innocent and loving. They were the bright spots in the dark life I’d made for myself, and from the moment I’d taken that picture in the afternoon sunlight, as my sister laughed and clung to her little boy, I’d kept it with me.

I’d needed something, always, to remind me that the world was not all darkness and violence and blood. That the world needed hard men like me to keep them safe.

The dream twists, folding in on itself, dragging me back to that horrible imagining of the night Ihadn’tbeen able to keep them safe, of Mika’s screams and Gregor’s cries, of the sounds of wet flesh and fists against bone, of men who were violent like me, but worse than I’d ever been.

I’d never hurt a child. And until Natalia, I’d never hurt a woman who I hadn’t paid for it and who hadn’t known up front what games I wanted to play.

As if the dream hears those thoughts, the screams change. They’re not Mika’s or Gregor’s any longer, but different screams. A woman’s screams, still, but one I recognize.

One I’vecaused.

Natalia’s screams, but full of a terror I had never heard from her before, a fear she had neverletme hear.

I try to run to her, but the dream slows me down, my feet heavy, my body dragged backward by some unseen force. I fight against it, desperate to get to her, to save her, and then I hear it.

Another scream, different this time as well. High and reedy, the shriek of an infant, and something snaps inside of me.

I keep going, fighting against the heaviness holding me down, the ground sucking at my feet in a way it never would in reality, the blank concrete building where I know she is seemingly never getting any closer–until, at last, it does. Until it’s right in front of me, and I feel the comforting weight of a gun in my hand, the relief of the door in front of me giving way when I shove it open.

I follow her screams, the screams of the child, until I rush forward into a huge empty room, blank of everything except the people inside.

I see Natalia, naked and bloodied and crying, her hands above her, manacled to the ceiling as she swings there, helpless. She looks up at me, her blue eyes exhausted, but instead of relief or hope at the sight of me there to rescue her, I see only a deeper terror.

“Please,” she gasps. “Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurtus.”

“I–” I open my mouth to ask what she means, and then I see it–the small and delicate shape of an infant’s head. The man standing there in front of Natalia, his back to me, is holding a baby–the baby whose shrieks are filling the room, who I know suddenly and instinctively isourbaby.

Natalia’s and mine.

I feel myself lift the gun, feel the protective rage filling me, the need to fight for them, to save them. To do what I couldn’t before.

To prove to Natalia that I’m not the man she thinks I am.

“Put our baby down,” I snarl, my finger trembling on the trigger. “Let them both go, and Imightnot kill you.”

I hear familiar laughter. “Oh, Mikhail,” the man says, his voice sending chills down my spine for a reason I don’t quite put my finger on at first. “You won’t kill me. After all, we want the same thing, you and I. Wearethe same.”

He turns slowly, the newborn infant still held in his hands, squalling. And in the dim light of the single lightbulb above him, I see the man I’d tried to rescue Natalia and our child from.

It’s me.

I wake up in darkness, heart pounding, drenched in sweat. I bolt half upright, the dream still clinging to me, mouth opened to scream before I come back to reality, the sheets clenched in my fists.

It doesn’t take much to unravel what that dream might have meant. And it fills me with a guilt that, for once, I don’t try to shake.

I have never, in all my life, let myself consider if I’d made a mistake. A man who lives the life I had could drown himself in guilt and regret, if he let himself question any of his choices. That, for me, has never been an option. But for the first time, I allow myself to look back at the choices I’d made in my relentless pursuit and seduction of Natalia Obelensky. I force myself to look squarely at where I had gone wrong.

I made mistakes, many of them. But I know how I felt about her, in the end. I know how she made me feel–whatshe made me feel, that night that I’d thought I nearly lost her. In that moment, all of it lay bare; I’d had to see the truth of what she meant to me.

It’s not too late.

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