Winter woke slowly, feeling her head pound harder against her skull then before…
Jesus… how long until she’d die of a brain bleed…?
She opened her eyes, her sight slightly blurry but she could still see her surroundings…
Partly…
Her face was still dropped, and she could tell by her position that she was tied down to a chair with that spiky rope you could buy at the local hard-wear store…
She struggled against her bindings, her body weak from the multiple head injuries…
When she rose her head, she winced, the spasms on her neck stinging.
She must’ve had her head down for a while…
“Good morning, Sunshine,” a man said in front of her.
She looked up then, squinting her eyes when she saw Kit sitting backwards in a chair across from her, arms lying on the back rest as he set his chin on his hands.
“Where am I…?” Winter questioned more to herself.
She felt a cold fear inside her… but she was so exhausted and in pain, feeling her eyes weigh as her head pounded, though she forced them open.
“We found out after tying you up,” Kit said, “that someone already got to you before us. Want to tell me who it was?”
“Why are you so eager to know?” she questioned softly. “Isn’t Layla working for you? Everyone else who wants to kill me has been.”
“No, surprisingly,” Kit said. “No one named Layla works here. But she did a surprising amount of damage.” He touched his head where Layla smashed Winter’s skull at school. “You have a pretty bad concussion, Sister.”
She shook her head in defeat, feeling the muscles on her neck burn.
“Dad would be pretty pissed to know that you’re injured,” he stated honestly. “Especially if he finds out that we made your injury worse by hitting your head with a gun. So….” He snapped his fingers, gesturing to Winter.
There was someone else in here… wasn’t there…?
She closed her eyes, trying to ease the burning in her head at least a little.
“You know that to do,” he told whoever was hiding in the shadows.
The figure stepped up to Winter, and she could tell even through the blurriness of her gaze that it was a girl.
She pressed her hands to Winter’s head, though her fingers were so cold…
And something warm emanated from them… deepening into her skull like hot water… and tingles spread through her skin, the blood running down the side of her neck vanishing, and her vision cleared.
She looked up then when the girl stepped back, feeling back to normal and completely healed.
It was Erica again… and of course Kit was sitting in the chair next to her, smiling down at Winter.
After looking around the room… she knew she was in some kind of abandoned building… though the old, rusty medical supplies, the broken chairs and beds… they told her she was in an abandoned hospital…
In the recovery room of all places…
“Are you going to kill me?” she questioned, struggling against her bindings harder.
Kit looked to Erica instead of answering her question. “You’re dismissed.”
She had a neutral expression, as if afraid to show emotion around him…
But she stepped away, making Winter struggle harder.
No, no… she didn’t want to be locked up in here with him…
“If it were up to me,” Kit said, “you’d be dead on the floor in a second.”
Winter swallowed at the less-than-cheerful thought.
“But it’s not up to me,” he explained, “it’s up to dad.”
A sudden thought crossed her mind, and she looked to Kit. “Where’s mom?”
He smiled. “No other reasonable questions? ‘Where am I?’ ‘What are you going to do to me?’ ‘Where’s Dante?’ ‘What do you want from me?’”
“I meant what I said,” she growled.
“If you really want to know,” he said, smile turning vicious as he gestured to a hospital bed, “she’s right there.”
Winter looked up, heart wrenching when she saw her mom lying on the bed, eyes closed as she lay still, unmoving.
“Why is she sleeping?” Winter questioned, brows drawing together.
And why was her skin so pasty?
“She’s not,” Kit said, making a sudden cold consume her. “Dad just wanted her back. He offered to make her dinner, buy her new clothes, anything to earn her love back, but she denied, screaming at him. Eventually, she was left alone, and she killed herself.”
Winter stiffened, lungs clamping. “You’re lying.”
“I wish I was,” he stated, the smile still there when he eyed Winter’s mom thoughtfully. “Though you can tell by her pale skin, that she’s been dead for a while.”
Winter went cold.
All this time…? All this time Sam was dead…? All this time when Winter vowed she find her… she was dead?
She wanted to scream in a high pitch, maybe blame herself or her mother for leaving her… but she knew none of that would be any good…
So she struggled against her bindings, crying out when they cut into her skin, but she didn’t stop, wanting to be free.
Kit only stared at her in amusement, watching her struggle as if it was entertaining.
“Why did she do that?” Winter sobbed, struggling harder. “WHY? Let me go! I don’t want to be here!”
“Kit, stop antagonizing her,” someone said from the doorway, making Winter freeze. “She’s going to come to life, we’re doing the ceremony tonight, Winter, alright? So don’t freak out.”
They meant… black magic?
No! NO! She’d go insane like Kit did! That wasn’t the way to solve this!
Winter struggled harder, hoping to loosen the bindings a little, but the ropes only burned her skin like they were made of fire.
“Kit, just go,” he said then, “leave us be.”
Why did the mysterious man’s voice seem so… familiar…?
But Kit got up from the seat, sending Winter a seething look…
It was something she’d seen in Cameron’s eyes before… fire mixed with cold stones in his gaze…
Jealously.
She watched as he walked out, practically fuming.
But then footsteps echoed to her, making her swallow down nausea as the mysterious man got closer…
She stiffened when his long, white fingers closed around the back of her chair, and his nauseating cologne filled her nostrils…
Did he bathe in it?
“She’s beautiful, don’t you think?” he said then, sounding mesmerized. “She looks just like Snow White… waiting for the magic to wake her up….”
Tears burned Winter eyes, and she forced her gaze away from her mother, looking down to her feet.
“You look like her, you know,” he said then. “Your hair… your eyes… Kit looked different… and so did your sister… They don’t look like her… I’ve been searching for you for quite a while, and you didn’t even recognize me all those times you saw me.”
Wait… she’d seen him before…? Was that why she recognized his voice…?
She could tell this was Dante by the way he spoke of her mother… He didn’t have the possessive, though protective tone like Cameron had…
It was an obsession… an unhealthy one that made him sound insane…
Dante stayed behind her, brushing some hair out of her face but she turned away, his touch burning her face like acid.
“Don’t be scared, Winter,” he said in a low, creepy tone. “I won’t hurt you unless you hurt me.”
“Who are you…?” she whispered.
“You don’t recognize my voice?” he said back. “Or is it hard to?”
“It’s hard to,” she answered.
He stepped passed her then, making her look up immediately to see his face, but his back was to her, stopping in from of Sam who still rested on the bed in front of them.
But she saw his short, silver locks… the ones that glowed in the lighting, and she said, voice shaking, “Who are you?”
Dante turned around then, lips tilted into a half-smile.
But she recognized his curvy jaw, his short, white locks… and the speckled hairs spread across his face…
Though his piercing, red eyes made something uneasy pass through her… and she hadn’t seen those eyes before… Not on him…
“No…” she whispered, shaking her head as her body burned with frost, “no… you can’t be….”
He smiled. “Recognize me now, Winter? Every morning in your Algebra class? I used the most common name, Young. Did I fool you?”
She breathed shallowly, body shaking.
This entire time… he’d been her Algebra teacher… The entire semester, he’d been watching her work and helping her with her math problems…
Oh, God… she’d never suspected him…
“You’re trembling,” he noticed, smiling still. “Why?”
“What do you want from me…?” she wondered, voice quivering.
“I want you to be my daughter,” he said then, circling around the beds and settled in the chair in front of her, the same way Kit did.
“Everyone says you want my powers…” she answered.
“Of course they do,” he shook his head, “you have the same powers as your mother, Winter. You’re just like her. But I just want you guys back. We could be a family, right?”
She stared. “Then… why did you kill Amelia…?”
“She didn’t take punishments well,” he said as if killing her was a normal thing to do, “I told you that in that dream you had, didn’t I? She’s a werewolf like me, I’m the alpha of the pack. When your underlings don’t listen, you whip them with silver chains, though she didn’t take it well, so I had to get rid of her.”
Winter swallowed down something hard.
He whipped her… just like Cameron’s father did to him…
And… apparently Amelia was a werewolf… like her father…
Winter wasn’t really that surprised… she noticed that Amelia was more obsessed with dogs than Winter was, and Cameron did tell Winter at some point that the red eyes were either werewolf eyes or fallen… She had already prepared herself for finding out either…
Dante looked back to the bed her mother lay in, smiling softly. “You’re just like your mother… So strong… so brave… And now no one will take you away from me… All of you are mine, you belong to me. I made you.”
He turned around then, looking to the chair Winter was in.
His breath caught, eyes widening.
It was empty…
He spun around, a bead of sweat dripping down his temple.
Crap… crap… crap…
But when he turned back to his ex-wife, Winter stood in front of him, glaring.
“What—” he started.
Before he could finish, she slapped him so hard across the face, her hand stung.
And as he fell sideways, she launched out of the room, knowing she had to find an exit…
ns 15.158.61.8da2
