“Ex-ballerina.” My throat closes.

“Oh, right. It said you broke your leg. Pity. I always wanted to be a ballerina, you know.”

“Never being one is better than having to give it up.” That pain will never go away, but it’s not worse than learning I’m only a means to an end to Adrian.

It’s not worse than falling for the wrong man and allowing him to suck my soul from my body.

“I guess.”

We change in a haste and then I fix her up and lift her shoulders so that her posture is straight like mine.

“Remember, stay in a daze. They’re used to that from me in the house.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t forget not to say that word in front of Adrian. He hates it.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember reading that.”

“And be careful of Ogla. She knows everything about everything.” And I’m more and more sure that she’s the one who snitched to Adrian about my escape attempt soon after Jeremy’s birth.

“Got it.”

“Next week, bring Jeremy with you and I’ll get someone to help me so I can take him with me. If Adrian says no, tell him you miss being with Jer and want to spend some time with him.”

“Yup.”

It’s going to kill me to live a week without Jeremy, but it’s a small sacrifice to make for escaping this life. One in which my fate is hanging on a word from Adrian.

The moment he decides he hates me more than he wants me, he won’t hesitate to get rid of me.

“If you survive another week after that, I can ask the person helping me to get you out,” I offer.

“Nah, I’m gonna be a boss bitch. Why would I want to leave?”

I grab her shoulders. “Listen to me, Winter, Adrian is dangerous.”

“So you keep telling me. Are you having second thoughts?”

“Of course not.”

She shrugs. “All is cool then.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you? Because it seems like you’re really having cold feet, girl.”

“I’m not, I’m just warning you.”

“Maybe you just don’t want to give up your man.”

“That’s not true.”

She hums joyfully. “Then is it okay if I fuck him? He looked smoking hot in the pictures.”

Her words stab me in the chest and bile rises in my throat. I want to scream no, that he’s mine and always will be, that no one but me is allowed to touch him, but is that true when I’m escaping him?

“I don’t care what you do after I’m gone,” I mutter.

“Cool. You can’t take it back now.” She gives me a Cheshire cat grin. “No changing your mind either. I mean it.”

I give Winter my bag with all my belongings and tell her to spray my perfume. She does that with glee and waves two fingers at me.

Hiding in the bathroom, I keep the door open the slightest bit to watch her go to Yan and Boris. My heart hammers loudly, expecting them to find out and come in for me, but they just walk in front of her, talking animatedly in Russian.

I release a breath, but the relief is short-lived. How could they not realize it’s not me? I know we look alike, but still. I’m disappointed in Boris and Yan—especially the latter.

Adrian will see her as me, too. He’ll touch her like he touches me, fuck her the way he fucks me.

Nausea assaults me and I want to throw up my guts in the toilet. However, I force myself to straighten and hold my head high.

This is for my survival.

I might love Adrian, but I won’t stick around until he’s bored of me, until he makes me go really crazy.

Now, to the next part of my plan.

Rai said she’d help me, and I believe her because she’s strong enough in the brotherhood to go behind Adrian’s back. Unlike Luca, she wants nothing in return.

I’ll tell her to hide me from Adrian, then help me escape from him once and for all.

38

Adrian

Being someone who trusts his system to the point of blindness, I can tell when something is wrong.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out where everything hit rock bottom. When the fuck did I start to lose the top-notch efficiency my system provided?

One thing’s for certain, Lia has something to do with it. Or, more accurately, my obsession with her does.

At one point, it became carnal and dark. I tried to lighten it at the beginning, to make up for my lack of feelings with my actions, to show her that she’s special to me, even if I’m wired differently and didn’t know how to feel as she secretly wished.

I thought she’d eventually see the effort I was making. It’d take time, but it would happen. Lia would come to me, not work against me. She’d trust me and talk to me.

But she chose another man.

One who has been in hiding since she confessed her adultery, because there’s no way in fuck she would’ve met him since then. I’ve been assigning an army to stay on her case and installing cameras everywhere she goes.

The more I smother her into my closed off system, the closer I am to losing control, because I know, I just know, this is heading for the worst, not the better.

I had a talk with her shrink—or more like threatened her shrink—and she said that her hallucinations are getting worse. She’s escalating from when she started to have this condition as a kid. In the past, antidepressants and sleeping pills managed to gradually rid her of her neurotic episodes, but lately, she’s been talking to Ogla about things that never happened.

She told me that Lia recently crossed paths with Hannah, her previous colleague and the current New York City Ballet’s prima ballerina. However, that never happened.

The psychotherapist is worried because this could be the beginning of a dissociation episode. Her condition has gotten worse since she was shot at during the women’s gathering organized by Rai. She had a PTSD episode and said she saw red eyes coming for her.

When the doctor said that she shouldn’t be put in stressful situations or surrounded by people who make her anxious, I distanced myself further. Even though it kills me to stay away from her, I can at least recognize that I’m the major cause of her depression and anxiety. Even Ogla, whom she didn’t get along with at the beginning, has gotten closer to her.