landed on a small closet door at the end of the room. I walked toward it, flinching as I saw my reflection in the bathroom mirror. When I opened the door towels were piled high. Bottles of hydrogen peroxide were there, along with other medications I didn’t recognize.
I grabbed some towels and peroxide and hurried as fast as I could out of the bathroom. As soon as I entered the chamber, I found Valentin’s eyes already watching me, his broad and bulking chest awash with blood.
Getting on the floor, I immediately took a towel and pressed the soft fabric around his neck, trying to soak up as much of the blood as I possibly could. Valentin didn’t even flinch; instead he stared down at my breasts, his nostrils flared and his lips thinned.
“I am fine,” I said.
His eyes met mine. Nothing was said. I wasn’t convinced he could speak now anyway.
Removing the towel, I took the bottle of peroxide and pressed my hand to his cheek. When he looked to me, I said, “This will sting, but we need to close up the holes around your neck. We need to stop the blood.” Valentin’s lifeless eyes never moved, even when I poured the peroxide over his cut and all around his neck.
I winced, knowing how it must have felt. I re-covered the holes with a clean towel. I moved closer, my heart as bruised as my body, to take in the broken expression on his face.
Valentin tracked me the entire way, but I could see his eyes closing. Dread and fear filled my aching bones. Touching his face, I said, “It’s gone, Valentin. You removed the collar from around your neck.”
The black stubble on his face stood in stark contrast to the paling sallow skin beneath. My heart surged when his lips twitched, then pulled into a ghost of a smile. A strange feeling washed over my soul as I saw that smile on his savagely scarred and brutal face, but it quickly faded when Valentin’s eyes closed and his body grew frighteningly still.
12
VALENTIN
“Where are they taking us?”
I gripped Inessa tighter as the truck we had been thrown into started to move, taking us away from the orphanage that had been our home for the past two years.
“I don’t know, dorogaya moya.”
I blinked, trying to see something in the darkness of the truck, but I couldn’t make anything out. I could hear the cries of the other children the Night Wraiths had chosen, whom she had chosen. I could hear their sniffles and fast breathing.
I closed my eyes, pulling my little sister toward me¸ stroking through her hair. I rocked her back and forth, sighing when her little body stopped shaking and she slumped against my chest.
I worked on keeping still; I worked on breathing in slow and steady breaths. But the truth was, I was terrified. The woman who dressed all in black had ordered the Wraiths to bring us out to the truck. When the door opened, the back of the truck was filled with small cages.
The blood drained from my face. I looked over to Inessa, who was being held by a Wraith. As he went to throw my sister in the back, she started screaming for me, holding out her hands.
As I rammed my elbow into the Wraith that held me his hand released my neck, and I climbed in the van after my sister. The Wraith turned when he saw me running and held out his gun. It didn’t stop me. I kept going, seeing the Wraith remove the safety, when a cracking sound hit the wall of the van and the woman commanded, “Stop!” The Wraith holding my sister froze at the woman’s command. Heels clicked on the floor behind me, and something ran over my neck and into my long messy black hair.
“Interesting reaction, don’t you think?” the woman said to the guard holding my sister.
I suddenly saw what had been running through my hair when the woman hit out a whip toward the guard’s still-raised gun. The gun fell to the floor. Inessa cried out and tucked her head in the Wraith’s shoulder. My hands balled at my sides and my teeth gritted together as I saw my sister looking so small in that bastard’s arms.
The woman then turned to me and ran the edge of the whip down my face. Her dark eyes were bright, and she leaned in, using the end of the whip under my chin to force my