Page 24 of Broken & Bound

My throat tightened painfully. Winter wasn’t a scene. She was my sister, my friend, and she was terrified. There wasn’t a single thing about this moment that was beautiful. Anger pulsed through me in waves. How come he couldn’t see it like I did?

For a fleeting second, I imagined my father and brother storming through the door. The Kings and even Marcel would insist on coming. They would save us all from this hellish nightmare.

If only—

“Paint, Autumn,” Sonny repeated.

This time I did drop my paintbrush. I knelt, and a tear slipped down my cheek as my eyes locked onto Winter’s. I couldn’t move; the pain and fear staring back was so intense. I instinctively moved an inch in her direction, wanting to offer her comfort.

The dog barked. Winter’s sobs grew louder and more panicked. And with trembling hands, I found my brush.

After I got the dolls to the car, I gave Marcel a quick call. He suggested I go back inside but wait outside the door to allow her time. Once the noise had quieted, I stepped inside. The room lay in shambles, and blood dotted Isabella’s cheek where she’d cut herself.

I drew up short. What had once been arranged with care—although dusty—had been reduced to ruin. There wasn’t a better way to state it. Porcelain littered the floor in jagged fragments, catching the light in uneven glints. Limbs severed at the joints.

Painted faces split down the middle, expressions frozen in what might have once passed for innocence, now warped and hollow. The fireplace poker was left discarded next to her. She sat in the center of it all. Rocking back and forth in a slow, relentless rhythm that didn’t seem to register my presence at all. Her hands were curled into themselves, knuckles pale, shoulders drawn in as if she were trying to make herself smaller, to disappear.

Her eyes were fixed somewhere far beyond this room, vacant in a way that stole the breath from my lungs while simultaneously squeezing my heart in my chest.

“You have no power over me,” she murmured.

The words slipped from her lips again. It was soft and unsteady. She kept repeating it like a lifeline she was clinging to, just to stay above the memories threatening to pull her under.

“No power over me. You have no power over me.”

I stopped a few feet from her, forcing myself to stay where I was instead of closing the distance too quickly. Marcel echoed in the back of my mind—give her space. Be there, but don’t crowd. Let her come back on her own. Watch her breathing.

It was harder to do than I thought. Anguish settled low and heavy in my gut, twisting deeper with every second I stood there. She looked so small sitting there.

The feeling of not knowing what the right move was almost broke me. I longed to rush over, but would that break her further? My gaze dragged over the room again, catching on the empty cabinet where the dolls I’d carried out had once been.

I could still feel the physical weight and fragility of them in my arms. The fact that I stared down into the face of my little mouse as I remembered her best, the delicate contours of her tiny face smiling and so trusting, left me reeling.

The uncanny resemblance the others held to Isabella and Tori, as if they had been plucked from the very depths of the past and brought to life in the form of these grotesque caricatures, shook me.

Dolls were nothing more than objects to play with. But those hadn’t felt like that. Not when I’d looked into those still faces and recognized pieces of people I cared about. Not when I knew they existed as a trophy for a sick and twisted pervert.

I tried my hardest to reconcile the Isabella of now and the frightened child she had been. How much unspeakable horrors still hid in the recesses of her mind? How had they survived it all? How was she going to survive going down into the basement if this room alone had unraveled her?

From everything I knew, it was going to be worse. Far worse. A quiet breath left me as I steadied myself, forcing everything sharp and reactive back into something controlled. She didn’t need me to fail her in this.

“You have no power over me. They’ll come for me. You just wait and see.”

The words were softer with a slight defiance to them. It was childlike in the purest way. That was it. My opening. I stepped closer, slow enough not to startle her, careful with each movement I made until I was within reach. Kneeling down, I let my hand hover for a fraction of a second before settling against her arm.

“Princess.”

The vacant look in her eyes wavered. She blinked several times, her brow furrowing as though she were trying to push through a thick fog. Everything about it was heartbreaking. One second she looked twelve. The next she looked like my Bella again.

Then her gaze settled fully on my face. Relief flooded her expression, and all the tension unraveled.

“Lev.” Her shoulders sagged. “My lion. You came for me.”

“I never left, but it’s been about twenty minutes. Do you need more time?”

A fresh wave of emotion filled her eyes. “I… Twenty minutes? I must have lost track of time.”

I followed her detached gaze as she looked around at the destruction.