My heart sank and my knees began to buckle, but I straightened up quickly.

He pushed open the door and the screams escaped the room in a whirlwind as if they had been waiting on the other side of that door to be set free. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands, but I knew better than to try. I knew to remain standing with my back straight, my eyes lowered and my arms either down at my sides or placed on my backside like Olaf was standing. I opted for folding my hands together behind me so that I could at least dig my fingers into one another as a way to cope and distract from the screams. They echoed vociferously through the moderately-sized room with high vaulted ceilings. I could smell blood. Bitter and stout, as clearly as if my face had been shoved in a pool of it. I had always had an unfortunate strong sense of smell that I often thought of as a curse. Especially in times like these.

Olaf guided me into another room adjacent to the main room where a boy, older than me and probably Willa’s age, was strapped to a strange-looking chair that allowed his legs to stretch out in front of him elevated evenly with the rest of his body. His blond head was strapped against a headrest by a thick piece of leather, like his torso and his ankles and his arms, which were laying out straight against the chair arms and bound at the wrists.

The boy thrashed about in the chair, though he could hardly move. Blood spilled out over his chin, crimson and sticky. His hair was drenched in sweat. His eyes were wide and frightened.

I wanted to throw up. I wanted to run out of that room as fast as I could, to hide in Willa’s room and hope to never be found but by her so that she could hold me against her breasts and comfort me.

But I could do nothing.

A man with curly gray hair, wearing a white lab coat stood over the boy with a pair of pliers in his hand, covered in blood. He didn’t even wear gloves. I got a dark feeling from that man, even worse than the one I got from Olaf. This man liked blood. The smell of it. The mesmerizing crimson color of it. The thickness of it. The taste of it. But most of all, I could sense that he loved drawing it, in any way possible. This man frightened me more than Olaf ever could.

“Is this the little jackal?” the man asked.

“Yes, this is Fredrik.”

“Good, good,” the man said and caught my eyes with a spine-chilling smile.

I didn’t want to look at him, and I wasn’t supposed to, but I couldn’t help it. Thankfully he didn’t feel any need to have me reprimanded for the mistake. No, this man was beyond beatings and punishment. His mind danced in Death’s realm too much to be bothered with such petty things.

He turned back to the frightened teenaged boy strapped in the chair and inserted the pliers into his mouth. The boy grunted and tried to scream while attempting to bite down on the pliers at the same time. But the man grabbed his lower jaw with the other hand and forced his mouth open.

My hands were shaking on my backside. Bile churned violently in my stomach. I started to look away until I remembered promptly that if Olaf noticed, he’d punish me.

The pliers wrenched back and forth, side to side, and a bloodcurdling sound of bone crunching almost made me faint. My knees began to buckle again, but this time I wasn’t able to control them and I felt Olaf’s hand around my elbow, catching me before I hit the floor.

I gathered my composure quickly and stood up straight, my breathing heavy and rapid, my hands trembling now down at my sides.

The man jerked the tooth from the boy’s bleeding mouth and dropped it on the floor.

And then he went to work on another one.

By the fifth tooth, I could no longer stand up on my own.

I can’t look at Cassia. My chest is heavy with the memory, a weight so oppressive and unforgiving that I’m still surprised every day of my life that it hasn’t killed me yet. I still have the nightmares. I still wake up in a feverish sweat, so tormented by the faces—those evil, those incapacitated—that I believe I’m living it all over again. And in my reality, it makes my need that much greater. It makes my addiction that much more dangerous. All-consuming.

I will never stop. I can never stop.

The past has shaped me, molded me into a monster. A monster with a persecuted heart and a dead soul.

Cassia

I can’t speak, not because I don’t know what to say, but because I don’t know what to start with.

My heart is breaking into a million pieces.

Fredrik pushes my hands away carefully when I try to cup his face within my palms.

“No pity,” he says. “Is that understood?”

“How can you say that?” I gaze deeply into his eyes filled with absolutely nothing, mine filled with heartbreak. “Fredrik—”

“No,” he says resolutely and rises to his feet, leaving me on the floor. “You have to understand, Cassia, it doesn’t hurt me to talk about it. I don’t cry myself to sleep at night thinking about my childhood. It does something else to me. It puts me in a much darker place.” His beautiful blue eyes peer down into mine with a chilling darkness. “I neither deserve nor want pity.”

I stand from the floor, the chain around my ankle shuffling as I approach him.

“Did that man ever put you in that chair?” I ask quietly from behind now that his back is to me. “Did he pull out your teeth?”

Fredrik’s shoulders rise and fall with a heavy, silent breath.

He turns around to face me, his tall height and gorgeous features as always make my heart flutter and my stomach harden when he looks at me like that, like he’s hungry for something. It’s the darkness within him, the part of him that takes over and compels him to control me, to ravage me in ways that, although I can’t remember, I know that no other man ever has.

“No,” he answers. “It never came to that with me. But many of the other boys, they weren’t so fortunate.” He looks away, his bare arms defined by hard muscles crossed over his hairless chest. “Other things were done to me. I would’ve preferred the teeth pulling.”

“What kinds of things?” My chest clenches uncomfortably just thinking about it. I step a little closer, being careful not to invade his space too quickly because I’m unsure of his mindset.

“Why do you want to know, Cassia?” He turns around fully now so that he can face me. He appears suspicious. “What are you trying to pull?”

Shaking my head repeatedly I say, “Is that what you believe? That I’m trying to manipulate you?” While I can understand why he’d have suspicions, it still troubles me to know that he even remotely believes that.

I step right up to him and close that last bit of space between us, resentment in my eyes. “Is that what you truly believe, Fredrik? That I would use something as horrific as your past against you for my own benefit?”

“If I were in your position,” he says cocking his head to one side, “it’s what I’d do.”

Hurt by his admission, my eyes fall away from his.

“Do you remember anything?” he asks, all too soon going back to the inevitable.

And I don’t have the energy to fight it anymore.

“No.” I shake my head. “I don’t remember anything.”

The chain is dragged noisily across the floor as I walk away from him and go back toward my corner.

“Cassia,” Fredrik calls out softly, “please don’t sit on the floor. I’m asking you.”

I do anyway.

Curling up in the corner with my back pressed against the wall, I pull my knees covered by my long gown toward my chest and wrap my arms around them. And I stare out at nothing, defeat consuming me.