Night Terrors

Chapter 12

Lena's POV

The dream always started the same.

A room. Not this room-another one. One that felt like home, or the childhood memory of one, one that lived in your skin before you even registered it with your eyes. My uncle's sitting room. The brown carpet with a permanent cigarette stain ingrained, the crooked lampshade and the smell of his constant smoking.

My uncle's face.

He wasn't angry in the dream. That would have been easy. He was smiling-the smile that always presaged him getting something from me, warm and full and empty all at once. He was talking but I couldn't hear the words. Just the smile and his hands and the door behind him which I could never seem to reach.

The room then shifted.

Men. Heat. The stench of sweat and liquor and the feel of rope biting into my wrists.

I woke up with a gasp.

The room was dark. My room, the nice one, the gilded cage, and for a few panicked seconds I didn't know where I was. Sitting up I pushed my hands through my hair with my heart banging a panicked rhythm against my ribs and looked around until the shapes took on the familiar form of furniture rather than danger.

I pushed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

Breathe.

The clock on my nightstand said 2:14 a.m.

I stayed on the edge of the bed for a long time until my pulse stopped pounding and started to retreat to something closer to normal. It wasn't a new nightmare-it had been coming back most nights since I'd been here-but tonight it had been sharper, more specific. Because now I knew too many things and my subconscious was putting them together without asking permission into something I was too scared to look at head on.

My uncle had sold me.

That was what I knew. From that first night I had understood. The transaction had been talked about like ordering a coffee, finalized, something that had to happen and had happened. But knowing something and really knowing it were entirely different countries and tonight the gap had been bridged.

He had known me my entire life.

Held me on his shoulders when I was a child. Sat across from me on Sunday dinner tables. Called me his little girl.

And then handed me over like something he was done with.

I stood and went to the window. The grounds outside were silent and black and only the slowly tracing arc of an orange cigarettetip signaled one guard on the far wall.

I watched him, and I thought about the nature of betrayal. About how it required intimacy. How you couldn't betray a stranger-not really, not with any kind of lasting effect that wasn't healed by the time you died-you had to trust someone first, had to grant them the unique access only trust allows.

I had trusted my uncle.

I pressed my forehead against the cool glass.

Somewhere down the corridor a floorboard squeaked.

I froze.

Another sound; it wasn't a step but the redistribution of weight, like someone standing outside my door, or at least right by it. I didn't move.

Then nothing.

After a minute I edged to the door and nudged it open a crack. The corridor was dark and empty, but the air still tasted of someone having just been there. I looked down the hall. Damian's door was in that direction. There was a flash of light from under his door, then nothing.

I stood there for a moment.

He had heard me.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it. Scared, or maybe something other, something else entirely. The man who had taken from me without my consent, standing outside my door in the dark, and not coming in. Not talking.

Just…there.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling, turning it over and over in my mind.

It didn't make what he had done any less. It would never make it any less.

But it did make another picture. A layer added to what I was seeing of him, a new piece that didn't quite fit with the others.

A monster who stood outside your room in the dark was still a monster.

But he was starting to look like other things.

And I thought that, as sleep slowly worked its way back around me, was perhaps the most terrifying part of all. Not what he was.

But what he was becoming.