Page 64 of Monstrous Urges
I shiver.
“In any case, you’re mistaken. No one is looking for you. Because you’re not missing, Taylor,” he growls. “You’re on a much-needed vacation.”
He holds up a familiar-looking phone: my phone.
I shudder. “What’d you do, retina-scan me when I was unconscious and fake-text my friends and coworkers?”
“Precisely.”
My mouth tightens. “What the fuck is this?” I blurt.
His lips curl dangerously. “What do you think it is?”
“I think I’ve seen this movie,” I spit back venomously. “What, I’ve got three hundred and sixty-five days to fall in love with you?”
Drazen smirks. “Not exactly,” he growls.
Suddenly, without any warning, he surges into me, erasing the distance between us as my heart claws up into my mouth. I whimper as his hand wraps tight around my throat, squeezing, making my eyes bulge in terror.
“It’s more like you have three seconds to tell me how you did it,” he snarls like a demon, sending my pulse spiking.
“D-d-id w-what?!” I cry.
“The door, Annika,” he chokes through clenched teeth, his face a mask of fury. I shudder as his hand tightens around my throat again, squeezing harder. “How did you unlock the fucking door.”
“I—I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“ENOUGH!” he roars in my face.
My legs turn to jelly. Pure terror swallows me whole.
“Enough of the fucking lies!” he snarls. “Tell me how you betrayed me thirty fucking days after our wedding.”
It jolts through me like an electrical current. My vision falters and flickers. A roaring, whining, alarm explodes in my ears as gravity gives way.
I’m watching a scene I don’t remember, featuring strangers’ faces that I remember all too well.
A wedding in a church.
Flowers that sting my eyes.
The rough bite under my bare knees.
My voice croaking “I do”.
Then fire, and screaming, and death.
Suddenly, I’m falling. For real, as the dream evaporates to mist and my legs give out. I topple backward, my heel catching on a divot in the stone floor of the patio. The small of my back hits the edge of balcony and I feel the tug of gravity as my body begins to slow-motion tilt over the edge to the rocks below.
An arm jerks out, strong, tattooed fingers wrapping tightly around my throat.
The world goes still as Drazen and I freeze in that position: me, half-fallen over the balcony, with the roaring waves crashing into the jagged rocks below; and Drazen, standing firmly on the balcony, one hand around my throat, keeping me from falling.
He doesn’t pull me back up.
We stay like that for so many frozen seconds that I can’t count. My pulse thuds hard in my ears, the sensation heightened by the hand squeezing my jugular. My skin crawls and tingles.
“Tell me,” Drazen hisses quietly, his head tilted to the side. “You owe me that much after fifteen years of hell.”