XV: (Fifteen) (War of Roses Book 1)

by Lana Sky

  Then darkness.

  Pain.

  And silence.

  I ’m home. Either that or dead. Only in heaven or hell could the air be so still and the world so quiet. Silk sheets chafe against my skin, and it’s painfully easy to picture what will await my eyes when I dare open them.

  White walls.

  A canopy.

  My old cage.

  Already, my capture lurks nearby, tainting my reality with his scent. Male. Unbearable. My lips flutter to put a name to him. “R-Robert?”

  But Robert never smelled like blood.

  “No,” my captor replies. The voice. The accent. They tether me in place more securely than physical binds ever could. “Guess again, Little Rose.”

  My eyes open, but the reality facing me isn’t the one I pictured. These walls are red. Heavy drapes shield the windows, and a lone figure lurks in the corner. His hair is unbound, partially shrouding his face. The only hints of his expression I can make out are a stern, clenched jaw and hollow eyes.

  “W-what happened?” I croak, though the question is merely a formality. It’s like we’re following a script, he and I. I feign ignorance while he smothers with rage, ready and willing to exert his authority.

  “You tried to run away, Little Rose,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. Mud and leaves cling to his fatigues and I remember.

  Running. Falling. Briar…

  My heart is throbbing. I cradle it in both hands, desperate to make sense of my thoughts. Sergei came to visit me. Like a fool, I escaped. I ran. But, of all people, I ran into my sister?

  “You hit your head pretty hard,” Mischa warns. “Hopefully there is no permanent damage—”

  “You went after me,” I whisper, ignoring every instinct in my body warning me to stay silent. “Not Briar. Why?”

  “Hmm?” He cocks his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rose. There was no one else. Just you. This property stretches for miles. Tell me, what would Briar Winthorp be doing so close?”

  My heart beats frantically in my chest, picking up on the suspicion lacing his tone. Is he being serious? Or merely trying to confuse me?

  Groaning, I dig my thumbs at my temples. “My head hurts—”

  “Drink.” He nods his chin toward the nightstand.

  I spot a tray waiting there, complete with a glass of water. Sitting upright, I grab the drink and drain it, never taking my eyes off him for a second.

  Laughing, he basks in the attention. I jump when he starts to advance. Only now do I notice the vibrant, red substance painting the flesh from his nose down to his jaw.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  He frowns at the sound of my voice, weak and hoarse. Almost like I really give a damn.

  But I don’t.

  More memories return in painful snippets, demanding my attention. “Briar. Where is she—”

  “Tell me. What did we decide on, Little Rose?” Mischa wonders as one of his hands feels along his thigh. With predatory grace, he slides his fingers into the pocket of his fatigues and withdraws something long. Gleaming. “That’s right. You want to be sliced into pieces.” He feigns ignorance as he hefts the blade for inspection. “Think. If I were to give you the choice right now between a permanent divorce or severing that pretty head from your body, which would you choose?”

  He seems to think it’s a serious question, one that requires ample thought and consideration. But it doesn’t.

  “I’d want you to kill me.”

  “Oh?” He laughs, spitting more blood down the front of his shirt. “Are you sure about that, Little Rose? No. I think you want to live. Badly enough you’d beg for it.”

  My eyes go to the knife. His fingers twitch over the handle, tightening, relaxing…tightening, relaxing. Clenching. For a second, I’m back in the woods, dangling by a thread. Don’t let me go!

  “Are you just going to watch, Little One?” he asks, drawing my attention back to his face. He watches me coldly and jerks his chin toward the door to the bathroom.

  I recognize the silent command. Not from Robert this time. Briar used to issue the same order whenever I found her hidden away in a room with a knife to her wrist. She never cut deeper than the surface layer of skin. Just enough to bleed. Her blue eyes would meet mine without a shred of concern and she’d always nod, merely once, when found. Clean me up.

  Silently, I climb from the bed and smooth out the skirt of my borrowed dress. As my bare feet brush the tiled marble of the bathroom floor, I realize I’m limping.

  “Your legs aren’t broken,” Mischa remarks as if in afterthought, but I catch him watching me, hunting my every step. “But you’ll bruise.”

  Bruises deep enough to ache with every step I take. Even so, I make it into the bathroom alone. After spotting a shelf of linen, I grab a washcloth and wet it beneath warm water from the sink.

  When I return to Mischa, he cocks his head back, directing with his gaze where I should clean first. His chest, not his face. Someone hit him there, drawing a stream of blood from his nose and splitting the upper lip. He’ll heal with a bruise, but nothing more.

  Below his collar, however, someone struck him with a knife. From a layer of rent cotton, I can tell that it’s deep. He’ll have another scar to add to his collection.

  “What happened—”

  “Your husband,” he says, gritting his teeth against the pain. “Did you ever see him wear a ring? You don’t.”

  I glance down at my naked fingers and swallow my instinctive answer back. My husband didn’t need a ring to own me. “Yes,” I say instead, picturing the silver ornament my husband was rarely without. “He wears the Winthorp insignia on his right hand.” It was an ironic signature for such an infamous family. Beautiful, even: a dove carrying a delicate blade between its talons.

  “So you’d recognize it,” Mischa says, almost to himself. The movement must irritate his wound, because he sucks in a breath and snaps his fingers.

  Obediently, my free hand drifts to the hem of his shirt, aiming to help him remove it, but he shakes his head, clenching his jaw. So I press the cloth against the wound over the fabric and hold it there. He hisses but then grinds his teeth to suppress even that much sound. After a few seconds, he bats my hand away and grabs the cloth himself.

  “I don’t dole out second chances, Little One,” he says, ignoring how fresh blood begins to taint the white fabric between his fingers. “But ignorance is bliss. So, this time, I’ll let you make an educated decision.”

  I flinch as he lifts the knife only to return it to his pocket. Before I can deflate in relief, he takes something else from his pocket. Something small. Bloody. It leaves a smeared trail of burgundy as it lands on the sheets before me.

  “Do you want to die as Ellen Winthorp or become someone new? Either way…” He stands and approaches the door while I observe the small object he left behind, attempting to identify it. It’s round. Shiny. Metal?

  “Your husband is dead,” Mischa tells me at the exact moment I recognize the item as a ring. One I only ever saw on one man’s finger. “I suggest you plan your future as a widow carefully.”

  A thud echoes as the door slams in his wake.

  Or does it?

  Perhaps the thunderous sound is just my heart stopping? I’m on my knees, clutching fistfuls of the sheets in search of stability I’ll never find.

  There is no mistaking that ring.

  There is no ignoring the blood.

  There’s no escaping Mischa.

  Your husband is dead.

  And so am I.

  CHAPTER 23

  Robert Winthorp is my identity, and he never needed a shiny diamond trinket to prove it. He adorned me with blood instead. With wounds, and scars, and terrifying marks on my psyche that could never be symbolized by something as frivolous as a ring. So how ironic is it now that one of his is all I have left of him?

  I can’t touch it. I can’t take my eyes off it, either. It speaks to me. I hear it hissing a vow t
o my very soul: I fucking own you, Elle.

  A shadow falls over me, darkening the scarlet sheets clenched beneath my fingers.

  “H-how?” I don’t even have to turn to know just who I’m speaking to. Mischa couldn’t leave me alone for long.

  No, he couldn’t resist. He had to watch. Whether he saw Robert’s demise with his own eyes or not, it wasn’t enough. After all, he warned me himself: This…this is how he wants to see my husband die.

  In my eyes.

  “How did you kill him?” I rasp, repeating the question when he hasn’t given me an answer. I can’t look at his face. The ring has my sole attention. Even now, Robert commands obedience. “Tell me how—”

  “Do you really want to know the answer?”

  I flinch at something I find in his tone—mainly what I don’t: there’s no mocking in it. He’s tired. He’s on edge. He’s not lying.

  “All you need to know is that the fucker’s dead, and you’re running out of time to decide whether or not you want to join him.”

  My heart falters, but not out of fear. Burning tears well from my eyes, spilling down my cheeks as hot as blood. Are they for Robert? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps they’re more selfish than anything else. Ellen Winthorp dies in an instant and it hurts. There’s no one there to mourn her. Just a monster who watches her agonizing end without a shred of mercy to spare.

  “Why?”

  For once, I’ve given him a question he doesn’t know how to answer. “You know why—”

  “No.” I shake my head, still transfixed by the tiny sliver of metal resting on the bed. “Not that. I want to know why. Why you hate the Winthorps. Why you—”

  “You have a lot of demands for a dead woman.” There’s nothing to temper the threat in his voice. His tone falls flat as the usual fire is extinguished from that piercing gaze. Left behind is a hollow mask, and for the first time, I’m faced with the real Mischa: a creature without a shred of humanity to hide behind. His accent takes over. Was he even speaking English in the first place, or had I conjured up some semblance of intelligible words in the grated series of growled syllables? “I guess you’ve made your fucking choice.”

  He advances a dangerous step, but I don’t cringe back. Not even when I focus my blurred vision in his direction and meet his gaze fully.

  “Tell! Me! Why!” I hardly recognize the shouting woman who utilizes my body to speak. I’ve only heard her once before, the same night he went too far and slandered my mother’s name. “What did they do to you?”

  “You want to know?” He snatches the bloodied cloth from his chest and throws it at me. Rage disrupts its aim and it smacks off the wall, inches from my head. Gritting his teeth against any pain, he wrenches his shirt over his head and turns, revealing the mangled flesh of his back. “You really want to know? Twenty-four years ago, your precious Robert and his fucking father had a plan to end the feud, you see. They meant to take my father but changed their target at the last minute. They took me and my mother instead. They locked us in a cage and placed bets on which death would matter more.”

  His vile words paint the scene for me. I see it. I see him. He had to be young. Twenty-four years.

  “Robert would have been a child—”

  “A child?” He sneers at the word, meeting my gaze from over his shoulder. “I don’t think you’ve ever met a fucking child, Ellen Winthorp. They lined my mother and me against the wall of their fucking dungeon and told me to choose. Your child of a husband gave me my options, barely as old as I was.”

  Eight, to be exact. Robert would have been eight. The Winthorps rarely displayed pictures of themselves as children, but I have no trouble imagining him: a beautiful boy with golden curls and soulless, brown eyes.

  “He told me to choose who would die. Me or my mother?” Mischa’s voice deepens, straddling the rasping edge of a growl. “They wanted me to pick but she…she made the choice for them. She begged for my life. So—” He breaks off, staring through the walls of the manor and into the past. “They made her watch them carve their mark into my back.” He extends his arm behind him, tracing the rough tip of the scar along his spine. “They made her watch them beat me within an inch of my life. And then they gave her a gun and told her I would only live if she made me pull the trigger—”

  I can’t hear this. My hands claw at my ears, but he’s there to wrench them away, ensuring I hear every word he has to say.

  “Her fingers shook, but I was too weak to pull away. She died with her brains in my lap, you little cunt. And then I had to watch the rest of my fucking family, picked off one by one. You ask why I hated your husband?” He shoves me back so hard that I fall to my knees. “That is why. But you disgust me more than that piece of shit. He knew what he was. You’re just a pathetic bitch, clinging to his shadow. So I’ll ask you now. Who do you want to be?” He drops something down in front of me. The knife, its edge mocking and bright. “Ellen Winthorp? Or the bitch he never let you become?”

  He kicks the blade closer to me when I don’t reach for it. Then he sinks down, caging my body against the floor with his own. Thick, wet fingers fist through my hair, using it as a tether to force me to face him.

  I’m sobbing, gasping and moaning through waves of tears. For Robert? For me? There’s no end to the grief, yet it has no true purpose. It just consumes, like fire.

  “Decide,” he snarls.

  What?

  Terror rips through me as he captures my hand against his palm, forcing my grasping fingers to scrape the carpet, grabbing something solid. It’s hard, conforming to my grip. I identify what it is without even having to look down: the knife. It’s almost too big for me to handle with one hand. Too heavy. It takes two tries before I can lift it and eye the beautiful, lethal edge.

  “You think you can kill me, Little One?”

  I’ve pointed the blade at him without realizing.

  Laughing, he tightens his grip and lowers the tip toward another target. “I’ll give you the same choice your husband gave my mother,” he explains. “Decide who you want to kill. The part of you that belongs to him?” He applies enough leverage to force the sharpened tip to kiss the flesh of my forearm. “Or the small, pathetic piece of you he never managed to touch?”

  Oh. My free hand trembles against the floor. Reaching around me, he seizes my wrist and tilts it, exposing where the veins lie. Instinctively, my naked ring finger flexes, sensing the imminent danger.

  “Do it,” Mischa commands. “Make your choice. Or are you so fucking weak you’ll die completely for him?”

  He lets me go, leaving my trembling hand to hold the knife alone. It twitches in the air, wavering toward various directions.

  Him. Me. The floor.

  Back again.

  “Do it,” Mischa goads, his mouth near the nape of my neck. There’s no fear that I might turn on him again. The enemy he’s presented is far more formidable than he will ever be: myself. “Do it!”

  The blade falls, cutting side down, and pain explodes through my entire being. White. Endless…

  Through a haze of tears, I see red. Red floors. Red walls. Red, painted skin.

  My heartbeat surges, forcing hammering blood through my veins. With the scent of salt tainting the air, Mischa’s grating voice is my only anchor to sanity.

  “Keep going,” he says thickly. “Do it. Do it!”

  But I don’t even know where exactly the knife continues to strike.

  Or, in the end, which part of me is cut away.

  Rose? Ellen?

  Regardless, one woman dies in the fiery torrent of blood and agony.

  And she doesn’t even scream.

  SAMPLE OF VII…

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  A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  Hey there!

  Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed the story, please leave a review and recommend the book to any friend you th
ink would love this twisted world. You’d have my eternal gratitude. Even a short sentence goes a long way!

  Then, come join the rest of us dark romance lovers in my Facebook Group where you can get snippets, sneak peeks of upcoming books and even help vote on aspects of future novels.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lana Sky is a reclusive writer in the United States who spends most of her time daydreaming about complex male characters and legless cats. She writes mostly paranormal romance, in between watching reruns of Ab Fab and drinking iced tea. Only iced tea.

  Other Novels:

  ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  SAVAGE FALL DUET:

  King’s Men

  THE MORE TREACHEROUS THE LIE…

  Ten years ago, Snowy Hollings did the unthinkable: she betrayed the love of her life.

  Now, when her family's fortune is decimated overnight, the popular socialite is in for a rude awakening: you reap what you sow.

  …THE HARDER THE FALL.

  Mysterious newcomer Blake Lorenz despises everything that Snowy Hollings stands for--and he's determined to destroy her piece by piece.

  When all is said and done, this ruthless corporate king will stop at nothing to torment the redheaded beauty.

  She had it coming, after all.

  And, when he's through, she'll be lucky if there's anything left to ever make whole again.

  SAVAGE FALL DUET:

  King’s Horses

  THE HARDER THE FALL…

  Ten years ago, Snowy Hollings betrayed the love of her life…

  Or did she?

  Blake Lorenz has finally broken the Hollings heiress but revenge doesn’t taste quite as sweet as he’d hoped. And as the murky depths of his past begin to come to light, the more he’s forced to realize that he may have made a grave mistake.