She kisses me lightly.

I try to avert my eyes, because I’m ashamed for what I’ve done. It isn’t the first time I’ve given in to Cassia like this, it’s not the first time I’ve slept with her in the year she’s been my prisoner. But it is the first time I’ve done it with something more in my heart than darkness.

“Cassia, I shouldn’t have—”

She shakes her head softly against the mattress. “Please stay.” Her smile fades and she suddenly appears dejected, but I feel like it’s not an attempt to keep me here.

It’s something else.

Her head falls to the side and she looks out at the room as silence descends between us. I wait patiently, though hanging onto her sudden change of mood with an impatient and conflicted heart. I feel like what’s left of my world is about to be pulled from underneath me.

“I was ten-years-old when I met Seraphina,” she says in a distant voice that seizes every fiber of my consciousness. “She was my best friend…until she murdered my parents and was sent away.”

A tear moves from the corner of her eye and pools around her nose, resting in that little indention above her lip.

I swallow down her words and say nothing because there’s nothing more to say. I know now that everything is lost and I’m never going to get it back.

Chapter Seventeen

Cassia

Fredrik carefully raises his warm body from mine and sits upright with his back against the wall. His legs are moved apart, arms propped on the tops of his bent knees. He tilts his head back. His beautiful, stubbly face appears crestfallen and defeated as he gazes out at the room.

I lift up and position myself between his legs, the side of my naked body laying against his chest. I can still feel him moderately hard as his manhood presses against my lower back. I love to sit between his legs. He makes me feel safe. And I melt into him when I feel his warm, solid arms wrap around me from behind.

“My mother and father were very loving people,” I begin. “They would never hurt me. But Seraphina didn’t like them. She said they were evil and that she wanted to help me get away from them.”

I pause, attentive to Fredrik’s heartbeat thrumming through the muscles in my back. I feel the breath from his nostrils warm against the top of my shoulder as he releases a long, deep breath from his lungs.

Still, he doesn’t speak, but holds me very close to him, and I tell him what happened exactly the way I remember it.

Twenty-three years ago…

I thought the girl who moved in next door was a little strange. I never saw her around her parents. I didn’t even know there was a little girl living next door until months after they moved in. I was alone in the shed behind our house—I spent most of my time there because it was quiet—when I heard the girl singing in the backyard. I crept out of the rickety metal door, trying not to let my father know about my hiding place, and snuck around the side to peek through a slit between boards in the big wooden privacy fence that separated our backyards. She had jet black hair cut just below her shoulders. And she wore a pair of pink shorts with a whimsical rainbow printed on the left thigh—I had a pair just like them and was intrigued by that otherwise insignificant detail.

She was sitting on the grass with a stuffed animal of sorts in her lap, tucked in-between her crossed legs. Beside her was a thick coloring book. I thought that was strange, too, as we looked about the same age and I had already grown out of coloring books. She scribbled furiously across the paper with a crayon while she sang quietly to herself. She had a beautiful, melodious voice.

I pressed my face farther against the fence, trying to get a better glimpse of what she was coloring, but she was a little too far for me to make it out.

But then she sensed she was being watched and the singing stopped. Her head shot up and she just sat there for a moment, listening for sounds. I didn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. I don’t know why I was trying so hard to remain unseen because I really wanted to talk to her. Maybe a part of me—the part that knew how dangerous she was before the rest of me did—was afraid of her.

And then she saw me. I only moved an inch because my back was starting to cramp, but that slight movement was enough to give me away.

She watched in my direction for a minute before rising to her feet and approaching me, the stuffed animal—a raggedy, dirty lamb, I noticed as she got closer—in one hand and a red crayon in the other. She left the coloring book on the grass.

“Hello,” she said, tilting her head to one side as if to see clearer through the uneven gap in the boards. “What’s your name?”

“Cassia Carrington,” I answered. “What’s yours?”

“Seraphina.” She smiled toothily.

I smiled in return. I liked her instantly.

She sat down in the leaves next to the fence and I did the same and we talked for a few minutes.

“I haven’t seen you at my school,” I said.

“Nah, I’m home-schooled.”

I watched her through the gap in the fence, only able to glimpse the dirty lamb in her lap and the tip of her index finger tracing around its little beady black eye.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m ten.”

“Me too,” she said. “But my birthday is almost here, so I’ll be eleven.”

“I just had my birthday. My mom bought me a new bike.”

“That makes me older than you,” she said with an innocent air of authority in her voice that actually made me feel sheltered. “But I don’t have a bike,” she added sadly.

I never had any brothers or sisters and had always wanted one. It was hard being an only child, especially when I had no friends, either. At least not until Seraphina. And in ten minutes of talking to her, I felt like I not only finally had a friend, but that older sibling that I always wanted, too.

It took me a moment to realize there had been something sad in her voice when she said she didn’t have a bike.

“Hey, you could come over and ride mine whenever you want,” I offered.

I heard her sigh. “Thanks,” she said, paused and then added, “but my dad doesn’t like for me to go to other people’s houses.”

“Oh.” I flicked the end of a twig with my middle finger and it shot across the grass. “Well, maybe I could come to your house.”

Seraphina was quiet for an even longer moment.

“They don’t like that, either,” she finally said, “but we can still be friends.”