Obsidian Music (Lion Security Book 3) Read Free

knew that I had been wrong.
    Someone else was just as crazy as that old fart.
    And it was my prison.
    I lay on my side and didn’t bother trying to move from the cold stone. There was no comfort here. I had been stripped bare, naked, with only a blanket for warmth. On that first night, the man who had threatened to fuck me threatened again to rape me as he tore my clothes off, saying it would keep me from running again.
    I had felt such fear that night, almost grateful when the woman had come into this small room, stopping the man’s taunts and actions. He hadn’t gotten close to raping me, but if she hadn’t walked in, he probably would have. Terror. I had felt terror.
    Now, I felt nothing.
    I wasn’t sure I could remember what terror felt like. I knew I had experienced it, but the memory just wasn’t there. Blinking, watching the room undulate, my stomach growled as I played with a stone on the floor. My shackles—shackles were definitely what they were—clinked with the movement, sounding loud even over the constant stream of Russian music that filtered like Hell’s music through the door, echoing in my cave-like prison.
    I knew they did that on purpose. After the first few days, when I had fought the man who lifted me out of the sewer hole and brought in my meals and changed the two buckets in the room—one with water, one for shitting and pissing in—they had started putting music outside the door to slowly drive me crazy. They weren’t too far off.
    I squinted, singing along to the song I had heard a million times now, shivering and watching the walls move. I had become an animal of sorts in those first few days. Survival and pissed off fury, my only emotion. When I had emotions. That was why they had bolted the shackles to the walls and put me in them. The chains reached a few feet, but not far enough for me to do anyone harm that came in to change the buckets or set down my two meals a day.
    I eventually told them two meals were not enough. Not nearly enough, considering the portions they put on the tiny plate, but they hadn’t listened. Or they didn’t care. The woman told me as she shaved my head again that it was enough to keep the babies strong—and not me. She had been right.
    I was weak. So damn weak.
    I rested a hand on my protruding stomach. No, I had no clue how long I had been here. Enough time had passed for me to be showing as a pregnant woman. I patted my stomach in a soothing gesture and continued singing and squeezing the rock in my hand and releasing it. Squeezing and releasing it.
    I knew that Daniil was alive. Thoughts of him were so real in my mind that sometimes I thought he was standing right in front of me in the darkness. Or holding me as I fell into a wary sleep. Or as I hummed the song he had played to me the last night he and I had made love in the music room.
    I thought a lot about him. He was the only thing that kept me sane. At least, as sane as I could be right now. I had never wondered what it would be like to become a prisoner in solitary confinement, but I somehow bet that even those people had more interaction with humans. Life as I knew it had changed. My world was the bomb shelter. That was all and my visions of Daniil in the darkness.
    And I sang…

    My stomach grew larger, and while my babies grew, I talked to Daniil. He sat across from me in the darkness, and he spoke to me about the trees and the sunshine and the wind. He told me about how the sunshine would glisten off the leaves of the trees around his home, and the wind would gently blow the limbs around. I asked him questions about what they looked like in Moscow, but he never answered those questions. He always spoke about the trees in New York.
    Until one day, his tone changed.
    He wouldn’t talk about anything beautiful anymore.
    It…I wasn’t sure, but I felt funny about it.
    I couldn’t pinpoint how I felt since I hadn’t felt anything in so long in my new isolated world, but he kept repeating one