Page 142 of Beneath the Light of the Moon

Anika didn’t stand a chance at protecting herself like this. Something was amiss, and she wasn’t alone in the room. Intuition and the familiar prickle skittering across her skin told her this. Even in her debilitated state, sheknewit was Mikko. She grappled against her mind even more fiercely.

As if sensing her trepidation, he spoke. His voice filled the space around her. “I can see you struggling to come to,malyshka, but I can’t have that. Notquiteyet.”

Her tongue twitched in her mouth, choice words for him dancing behind her teeth, but silence was all she could manage. Rough bandages scraped along various areas of her skin, her wounds miraculously patched up although still sore.

Mikko continued, not needing her responses to carry on aconversation of his own. “But I’m going to give you moremedicineso you can heal.” He was closer now, the mattress dipping beneath his weight as he presumably sat next to her prone form. “If you’re to be your best self when you come to, you’ll need rest.”

Moments from before flashed behind her closed eyes.

Levi’s blank expression, the violets in his drink taking effect.

Her struggle in the dark to reach her gun.

And the taste of violets on her tongue as Mikko made her drink her own poison of choice.

“You’ll wake when I want you to,” his breath whispered across her face in the present. Internally she cringed, wishing she could headbutt him in retaliation. Again.

The pieces started falling into place as the feeling in her entire left arm started coming back. Excitement wiggled its way into her head; Mikko thought her weak and dull in comparison to him. All she had to do was act incapacitated—

Something poked her arm near the crook of her elbow. The pain was a blessing spreading across her skin as a reminder she was returning to this dimension, but that relief was soon erased.

A needle wormed its way beneath her flesh, the unknown liquid inside eager to make her forget—to make her weak. Anika tried to fight it, teeth gnashing together faintly behind her lips, but it was for nothing. She couldn’t outrun the effects of whatever drugs Mikko deemed acceptable to pump through her veins.

And the blackness enveloped her, her childhood memories the only thing left to keep her company.