Page 71 of Purchased

Mr. Volkov is making notes feverishly.

“How do you feel when Beatrix shares nothing with you?”

“I feel great,” Armand says, his tone dripping sarcasm. “Brilliant. I enjoy being shut out of her internal world and having to guess at the forces that formed her, and being unable to understand where she is coming from, or what I can do to make her happy.”

“You want to make me happy?” I ask him the question, not because I didn’t know that, but because I’m setting a conversational trap.

“I would die to make you happy.”

“I’m still not going to tell you about my childhood, but I will tell you that you dying won’t make me happy,” I tell him.

He narrows his eyes at me for a moment, then relaxes a little as he gets the joke, somewhat against his will. He doesn’t want to think this is funny. He wants to be annoyed, because I’m not giving him what he wants, but he’s too good-natured and he likes me too much to stay mad.

“Alright, so I know you don’t want me dead. I know one thing.”

“You have a binder full of things you know about me,” I say. “A whole stack of Beatrix facts. What else do you want?

He looks at me deeply, seriously. “To know you as you know yourself.”

CHAPTER16

Beatrix

That night, I dream I am small. There is snow outside, but it is being painted black with blood in the moonlight. There is so much fighting happening, fighting that makes me excited, but I cannot participate.

My older brothers are fighting out there, and so is my father. I am curled up with my mother, who is in her wolf form. I am the only one who cannot become a beast.

The fighting is getting closer and closer. We hear bangs and whines and cries and shouts as shifters are forced out of their wolf forms by injury or something else. I do not know entirely what is going on. I can see a little through the window aperture that has been left open so my mother can keep her eyes out for a moment we all hope will not come—and that comes anyway with the inevitability of a story being told against my will.

My mother turns to me and nudges me up. I have been taught what to do in these situations. I grab the fur at the back of my mother’s ruff around her neck and I hold on tight as she runs out the back of the house. The moon is so bright it feels like it is daytime.

I love running with her this way, being carried across vast distances with her powerful body keeping me safe. The smell of her fur is so comforting, I cannot bring myself to be afraid. I know I will be safe, because she has always kept me safe. I know everything will be okay, because everything has always been okay. I even close my eyes as she runs. I’m not supposed to do that because of the risk of falling asleep and losing my grip, but it feels so good, like being rocked and comforted with the rhythmic up and down motion.

I don’t hear the bullet that hits her. One moment I am pressed tight against her powerful, furred body, and the next we are both skidding and rolling through the snow. She is no longer in her wolf form. She is naked and she is bleeding and she is making a sound that will forever be wired into my being.

She reaches for me, but her hands cannot grasp me. They are too weak. Other hands reach for me. Bigger hands belonging to tall men with long guns. They pick me up by a leg and dangle me in front of them.

They are arguing over whether to kill me or not. I know that, even though I do not understand a word that comes out of their mouths.

They speak a blunt and brutal language. It is foreign to me, and sounds harsh and cruel to my ears. Little do I know that one day I will think in it and speak in it and my native tongue will be lost to me.

“Beatrix… it’s okay, you’re safe. I’m here.Je suis là, tu es en sécurité, mon amour.”

I wake up to Armand reassuring me in his native tongue and the language we have learned to communicate in. I’m crying. I didn’t know that.

“It was just a nightmare,” he says.

But it wasn’t. It was a memory. One I had forgotten I remembered. I used to dream of that night a lot, but as I got older I stopped thinking about it. I made myself stop remembering it. And now it’s back. And it feels as present as it did the day it happened. I feel it viscerally, in my body, every bit of fear, horror, outrage, and sadness in me. I am shaking and I am crying, and Armand’s arms and voice are not enough to chase it all away.

He holds me tight and murmurs soft little comforting words to me until I start to calm down.

“That must have been such a bad dream,” he says. “I’m so sorry. Do you want to tell me about it?”

No. I do not want to tell him about it. I don’t want to think about this again, or anything even remotely close to it. I want to lock that shit away so I never, ever have to remember or feel it again.

“You have to stop digging up the past. You have to stop asking me questions about what happened. You have to fucking stop, or I am going to go crazy,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says. “No more questions. Do you want to try to go back to sleep, or do you want to see what cake they have in the kitchen?”

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