Chaos exploded.
My father, his face a mask of volcanic fury, was shouting orders into his phone.
Men with grim faces moved quickly through the room, the sound of holsters unsnapping and keys being thrown on the table.
The sound of a war being prepared.
I was frozen, the defiled photo of my mother burning the table where it lay.
*Empires burn. Princesses do, too.*
My father snapped his phone shut. "You. Stay here," he ordered, his voice a low growl.
He turned to the only point of calm in the storm. "Volkov. You are her wall. No one gets in. No one gets out. Understood?"
Dante just nodded.
Then, they were gone.
The heavy front doors boomed shut, and silence fell. A thick, heavy silence a thousand times more terrifying than the shouting.
Because I wasn't alone.
He was there.
Across the room. Blocking the only exit.
And the doubt in my soul *what if the real monster is him?* was now screaming into the void.
My gaze fell again on the photo. The red 'X'. My mother's smile. The alley. The pain. The dragon. It all hit me at once, a tidal wave of pure terror.
The floor seemed to tilt. The walls were closing in.
My breath hitched. I had to run. But from what? The memory, or the man watching me?
I tried to bolt, but my legs turned to jelly.
I collapsed onto the rug.
The panic was a paralysis.
"Maria?" Our housekeeper's name was a thought, a wish, but no sound came out. I tried to scream, to call for help, but my throat closed up. Only a weak, pathetic hiss escaped.
I was trapped down here with him.
In desperation, I started scrambling backward, away from him, my hands and heels digging into the expensive rug. Every inch was an agonizing victory.
He turned.
The movement was slow, deliberate.
He turned, not toward the door, but toward the liquor cart in the corner. My vision was blurring with tears that began to stream, hot and silent, down my face.
I couldn't see what he was picking up.
A weapon?
A knife?
Then he turned back to me and began to walk. Slowly.
Each footstep echoed like a funeral drum inside my skull.
I kept scrambling backward until my back hit the cold wall beneath the window. Trapped. There was nowhere left to go.
He stopped right in front of me, his shadow swallowing me whole. I flinched, squeezing my eyes shut, bracing for the pain, for the end.
I opened my eyes. He was kneeling in front of me, on my level.
In one hand, he held a glass of water."Drink," he said. His voice was low, unexpectedly calm. "Slowly."
The kindness threw me off balance more than any aggression could have.
I stared at him, shaking uncontrollably.
He sighed, a barely perceptible sound.
He set the glass aside and, against every survival instinct screaming inside of me, he touched me.
His large, warm hands landed on my shoulders. The touch wasn't violent. It wasn't sexual. It was firm. Solid. Grounding.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice now laced with steel. "Breathe. I'm here."His voice cut through my panic.
The weight of his hands anchored me. I obeyed. A shaky breath. Then another.
"No one is going to hurt you while I'm here," he said. The words weren't a comfort. They were a declaration. A fact. And the most shocking thing happened.
The tension in my shoulders eased. The sobs quieted into silent tremors. I looked at him, no longer with terror, but with a raw vulnerability I had never shown another soul.
That dark glint I thought I'd seen? It must have been a figment of my panicked mind.
Because the man kneeling in front of me, holding me together with nothing but his touch and his will, couldn't be the monster.
Could he?