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Prologue

Calax

The dream started off as it always did.

I sat on the bed in my apartment, my back against the headboard, as indecipherable voices reached me.

Shutting the book I was reading, I moved stealthily towards the door. The voices were louder now, but their words were still indistinct.

“Hello?” I asked. Slowly, with bated breath, I pushed the door open and stepped into my living room.

My heart was hammering inside my chest, each heartbeat threatening to be my last. That was what fear could do to you. It was an all-consuming, all-encompassing type of terror. A double-edged sword waiting to fall. A mosquito sitting on your bare arm but never biting. Nails scraping against a coffin seven feet under.

“Hello?” I repeated.

Was itthem? I didn’t want to see them, see their masks. They were the prime instigators of my fear, though I would never admit that aloud. Instead, I shoved it in a box under lock and key and buried said box miles beneath cement.

“Callie!” a familiar voice cooed. The fear dissipated instantly, a flame being blown out, and I found that I could breathe again. The clenching of my heart ebbed as suddenly as it had arrived. My lungs, which had once been unable to take in air, now greedily lapped up all the air they could.

Hearing her, seeing her, was like stepping in front of a fire after days in a blizzard.

Addie’s brown hair was cascading around her shoulders, and her eyes twinkled as if she was in the know of a secret.

The scar from her confrontation with Lizzie still marred her beautiful face, but she was whole and alive. It was all I could ask of her.

“Baby,” I whispered reverently, scooping her into my arms. Her head nestled beneath my chin, and I held her tighter, my arms iron vises around her tiny, slender frame. “I miss you, Baby.” My voice was a hushed murmur.

“I know.”

“I love you so damn much. Do you know that?”

I needed her to hear it, to understand, to feel the love that seemed to seep out of my every pore.

“I love you too.” She nuzzled my cheek with her own. “And that’s why you have to hold on. You have to fight, Callie. Fight for me. Fight for us. I’ll come for you.”

“Promise?” I hated how my voice broke, the tiniest of trembles that hinted at what I wanted to remain hidden behind an apathetic front.

Her smile was sincere, reaching her eyes, when she gazed up at me through her fringe of black lashes.

“I promise. You own me, Calax. Heart, body, and mind. You’re mine, and I’m yours.”

Mine.

That word reverberated through my head long after I woke up.

* * *

It wasn’t oftenI felt pain.

They tried, but I learned how to bury it. The pain, that was. Bury it beneath layer upon layer of sand and cement until it was nearly unrecognizable.

But pain? It crept up on you when you least expected it. That monster lurking beneath your bed, waiting for the moment you fell asleep.

“Where is she?” This was his only question. Never “How was your day, Calax?” or “How are you feeling?”

The demand, the question, would float through one ear and out the other.

I would stubbornly face the wall, eyes fixated on my reflection in the mirror. My hair was greasy and disheveled, and a beard covered the lower half of my face, a tangled mane.

It wasn’t often that they allowed me to bathe, so I was sure I smelled something awful.

The pain that had once dominated me had since diminished. Surgery after surgery after surgery until I was sure I resembled Frankenstein’s monster.

They said it made me whole, but without Adelaide I was a broken man. A shell of who I once was. A statue that had been dropped one too many times.

But I never told them. They could hurt me, they could evoke agonizing pain, but my lips never spilled the secret they so desperately desired.

They might have saved me, but that didn’t ensure my loyalty. Only one person had it, along with my heart and soul.

Until the day I died, the day they killed me, they would never get any information about Adelaide.